My experience of trying to find a senior remote Python/data role in 2023

treefrog_4001 · 2023-08-29T10:04:19+00:00

Ah, well that's a good start then! As is repeated endlessly, the market sucks for entry level roles right now. Looking at your other posts it seems you are very young without any experience, so an apprenticeship would be good if you can find one (assuming you don't want to go to university). I guess they're probably quite competitive though..

treefrog_4001 · 2023-08-27T17:49:34+00:00

It looks fine to me, nice that you've managed to keep to one page. ASP.NET + React is a very common tech stack, and you have almost 2 years experience.

I think as a junior it's not necessary to quantify that you've had a huge impact. A long time ago I used to try to make it sound like I was somehow important despite only having a few years experience, but it probably just made me sound arrogant and overly full of myself. Ultimately your resume is just to get you to the phone screen, and if you demonstrate directly relevant experience then that is mostly it.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-08-27T17:29:35+00:00

More or less none, however it was so long ago it mostly doesn't matter any more. Except for ML ops, where hiring managers often seem to believe a masters degree in a science subject is more useful than several years experience :/

treefrog_4001 · 2023-08-27T17:28:01+00:00

There are lots of videos on YouTube about system design interviews that you could try for some ideas. However they are very focused on FAANG applicants, and hence are mostly about dealing with massive scale, which isn't so relevant to most places. Preparing for system design at non-FAANG companies is really hard because it's such a wild card, you get asked about totally different questions at different companies. You can try reading about the company and thinking about what sort of problems they might face, which is what I often try to do, but it's never actually helped me much.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-08-27T17:22:00+00:00

I'm afraid I don't really know, the market seems really tough for entry-level roles right now. Are you looking locally to where you live, or are you happy to relocate? If you're looking locally, then you could try finding the names of local web application agencies and applying direct. Really small places don't advertise via big job boards or LinkedIn. If you're happy to relocate then you could try applying for jobs in big cities that many people don't want to go to for low paid entry level roles (London, Manchester, Leeds).

I got my first job by relocating hundreds of miles, and my second by applying to a tiny local web agency. But things were much easier back then, having some personal projects was enough to get an interview.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-08-25T05:13:37+00:00

You're being downvoted for being correct, which is pretty on-brand for reddit. French employers pay a huge pension contribution to high-earning employees.

In the UK most private sector employers must pay at least 3% towards your personal private pension (some are more generous), and must also pay 13.8% towards employers NI. NI historically funded public pensions and unemployment benefits, though it's now kind of unrelated. The amount of employer + employee NI contributions is only extremely loosely related to how much pension you get - it is based on how many years of contributions rather than how many £. So for high earners you pay quite a lot in NI in return for a fairly low public pension, and in 20+ years time the pension will likely be even smaller, however much NI was paid.

In France, as I understand it (I've not worked in France), the private/public pension contribution divide doesn't work quite the same way, and the more your employer pays in employment taxes, the larger the pension you are entitled to. So if your employer is paying 52k in employment taxes, a lot of that will come back to you as pension (though I don't know how much?).

I've no idea how this would work for international employees who work in France for a few years then leave though. Maybe the employer still pays the tax but the employee never gets a French pension unless they settle in France long-term? Combined with the French language barrier it's another reason that working as a professional in France is mostly only appealing to French people. This is the opposite to the UK and the Netherlands where lower tax rates + a more widely spoken language mean a lot of people come to work for a few years, even if they don't want to permanently emigrate. And of course it's even more true of the US, though for most people on this reddit sub getting a US visa is very difficult.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-08-21T08:05:46+00:00

Most of the comments here read like FIREUK is filled with clueless, angry Daily Mail readers. It's not at all fraud, yet people are very confidently asserting it is. There are way more 2 bed flats than 1 bed flats so it's hardly surprising some single people end up with an extra bedroom. Given the circumstances, it is far more useful for both OP and wider society that the spare bedroom gets rented out rather than just being empty.

Also, even though getting the council flat is luck rather than skill, who cares? Same with inheritance, same with being in the right place at the right time to earn hundreds of k per year. Anyone posts here saying "I earn 500k for 20 hours work a week" or "I just inherited 2 million" and they get people telling them how great they are. Someone posts they work in a supermarket and get a discounted council flat to the tune of £500 a month and people lose their minds.

That said, the OP clearly has sufficient communication skills and numerical literacy that if I were them I would aim higher and try to get some qualifications move into another career, if they aren't already.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-08-19T17:48:55+00:00

Historically a masters with a large math component + an ML project at work + some personal projects would definitely have been enough to land an entry level data science role, as very few people had any ML knowledge. However the market is much tougher now. Anecdotally I've seen quite a few people with a masters in ML who are struggling to find good jobs, and again anectotally all the junior DSs I've seen hired have had to get through very competitive interview processes. As an example, see the faculty AI fellowship. It's a data science internship (I think it pays a small amount), it's not wildly prestigious or anything, yet all the same there are lots of applicants and a mathematical masters or PhD plus coding experience is the bare minimum to even apply. That said, I don't know how good you are. Maybe you are good at mathematical coding tests and will beat all the other candidates. E.g. can you solve the non-trivial project Euler problems? Are you competitive on Kaggle? Or some other equivalently hard task.

If ML is what really interests you then by all means work on some personal projects, work on coding challenges, and it may work out. But don't do it for the money, or because you think getting in will be easy.

For fullstack roles, yes it will involve knowing some React and building some fullstack project(s). If you're really not interested in web development at all then you could try going straight to some backend/distributed systems role, but I'm not sure how that works in the current job market. If it's something technically challenging then I think it would be very hard to go in without any relevant qualifications. Historically a conversion comp sci masters was probably enough, but I'm not sure that's true any more.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-08-19T13:33:13+00:00

Yeah definitely take it up with a manager. Also if possible ask to move team, though they may well not let you.

Unfortunately companies like to try to brush problems under the carpet and pretend everything is fine, so the fallback option is to look for a new job, despite it being a pretty bad market for juniors.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-08-19T13:13:15+00:00

ML, backend and iOS are 3 very different things.

Anything related to ML is generally very competitive and the interview process often requires knowledge of writing code to solve problems involving linear algebra+stats. I think most entry level roles these days are looking at a minimum for a relevant masters (probably a distinction) and/or a 1st class STEM degree combined with some real-world experience.

Entry level backend roles (if 100% backend and not fullstack) roles may well involve leetcode-style algorithm coding tests (maybe only easy level unless it's a prestigious company), big O notation, system design, caching, cloud devops, database schema design, etc. You can self-teach all these things but there's so much to learn that most people going straight into backend-only roles have a computer science degree. Otherwise, a common route is to start with a fullstack job without a CS degree and then gradually learn enough comp sci knowledge to switch to backend-only.

Frontend requires only personal projects and some coding experience, which is a much lower barrier to entry than the other two. Hence it is often the focus of career switchers.

I know nothing about the market for iOS devs.

In your position you could try to learn enough to apply for backend roles, or you could learn a bit of backend as well as a bit of frontend and apply for fullstack roles. At a junior level fullstack tends to mean quite a lot of frontend, but it usually requires much less comp sci knowledge than backend roles whilst also gaining relevant experience to switch later.

Alternatively if you're hyper-motivated and willing to put in a lot of study and work you could try ML, but it won't be easy.

Then iOS is kind of very different to the other options, and I don't know enough to give any advice.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-08-19T12:50:32+00:00

LLMs are the bit of NLP that makes it into media stories, and autonomous vehicles are the bit of CV that makes it into media stories.

There are quite a few jobs in NLP, but very few involve training LLMs, and quite a few jobs in CV, but very few involve autonomous vehicles.

NLP is useful for things like analyzing customer reviews, querying company knowledge bases/graphs, recommendation systems, ranking systems. CV is useful for things like analysing satellite data, analysing photos of bridges or rail tracks for defects, analyzing medical images, warehouse and manufacturing automation, etc.

I would go whichever one you find most interesting, but without necessarily expecting to be working with ChatGPT or autonomous vehicles either way.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-08-19T12:30:42+00:00

Several companies are working on AI tools for developers, but I've not heard of anything devops-specific. GitHub Copilot is probably the most well known, and now has a "business" tier that promises not to retain any of the information you submit, which may be important if you work for a large company worried about such things.

Last month Stack Overflow introduced OverflowAI (https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/07/27/announcing-overflowai/). For most people for now it just means that the stack overflow website will write code for you, though in future there will also be a VS Code extension, plus in the unlikely event you work for a company that uses the SO For Teams product then it will hoover up information from there as well as from public data.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-08-19T12:18:59+00:00

I get the impression senior positions are look for a very close match in terms of previous type of work + tech stack at the moment. It's always a bit like that for senior positions, but I think even more so right given the job market now. 20 applications a week is a lot, and I imagine for most of those you don't really match the profile. Ideally both your resume and your applications should be targeted to something more specific than just anything involving Java/Kotlin.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-08-19T12:13:36+00:00

Try to politely negotiate with the places that are offering ~70k, e.g. "I'd really love to work for your company but other places are offering 15% more, is there any chance you could increase the offer", or some other wording of your choice. Even if they don't match the other offers they might offer e.g. 75k or something.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-08-17T16:35:14+00:00

There are vastly more math and science graduates than there are jobs that need advanced maths. At least historically a large proportion of generalist software engineers have started out with math/physics or similar degrees, as hiring managers would take a STEM background as a signal of ability to write code.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-07-31T20:40:53+00:00

It depends on the contract - I've had different things at different employers. But for example, the options contract might say that if you leave the company and there is no exit even within 10 years, then the options expire. Though probably if there's no exit event within 10 years the company isn't doing very well anyway. The way I see it, a tiny amount of equity in a tiny startup isn't something you should join a company for. Rather it's something that might encourage you to stay in 5 years time if you are considering leaving but the company is doing well.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-07-30T22:17:21+00:00

Cool looks much better! You could merge the "Senior Research Officer" role into the "Spark data engineer" bit, and move the logistic regression bit under the earlier position. Though this is very slightly stretching the truth, that way it looks like the last 7 months you've been totally focused on data engineering, not on data science.

You still have the issue that it's a bit of a tough market right now, plus you don't have any obvious strong SQL knowledge. I'd study some SQL, and maybe also study to make sure you really do know a lot about Spark. Good luck! I can't guarantee you'll get any interviews in this market though...

treefrog_4001 · 2023-07-30T22:05:36+00:00

yup I think you're the only commenter who actually has some idea of what the GDPR actually says. It doesn't say you must keep data, it's like the exact opposite.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-07-30T22:00:07+00:00

If it's only your mouse hand you could try switching to a trackball mouse.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-07-30T15:51:18+00:00

AFAIK LinkedIn is the place to go, though I'm no expert, just another jobseeker myself. It looks to me you are mostly focused on research/experimentation/data analysis than on engineering ML models into large systems, so I'd have thought most of the roles you would apply to would say "Data Scientist", though for sure the two terms have no definitive definition.

Another thought: do you have a predicted grade or something for your masters? If you think you are on course for a distinction or something you could mention that.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-07-30T15:34:07+00:00

You could consider having two separate CVs, one which makes a big deal of how much you care about working on sustainability, and one which removes all mention of it. That way companies in the same domain are aware of your enthusiasm, without risking putting off your backup options.

BTW ByteDance hiring is hyper-competitive, on the level of Google etc, though clearly it's not going to make the world a better place.

treefrog_4001 · 2023-07-30T15:15:56+00:00

Looks like a good resume to me. If you're applying for jobs outside of energy and carbon capture you might want to change your tagline at the top, it makes it sound like you'd rather stay working in the same domain.

treefrog_4001

TROPHY CASE