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Anyone exited into stripe?
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Has anyone else begun to resent data science?
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Subject Expert
Time to come in with my unpopular opinions. DS roles without decision making authority are a dead end. Maybe a little less so for SWE roles.
At some point you will want to be on the product side making decisions. You might as well try to go straight there or into a role where you can lateral to the product side and skip ds/swe.
Subject Expert
I’m a buyer across a number of different areas (data, cloud, software, etc) and meet most of the product teams. I’d estimate that it’s 50/50 on technical chops.
Maybe wrong. It would be interesting to do some LinkedIn scraping to test my 50/50 split.
Edit: this link suggest my gut estimate isn’t way off. It may or may not be accurate.
If you're willing to move and work on tech I'd say the engineer/MLE salaries are on average higher than (non research PHD) data science positions, though the top end range can be high on both.
Particularly in FAANG you'll be making that total comp quite quickly as an earlier level SWE. However either field, especially without the background or formal schooling, will take a lot of effort to break in so I think you'd really have to love it to invest that time just to catchup to a fresh CS grad.
The thing I can't answer well, particarly for DS, is the long term trajectory of the career.
Director 1-- screening on sites like levels.fyi that are more accurate than Glassdoor, a company like Netflix pays out ~400 cash for a data scientist with 3-5 years experience. Definitely on the high end, but the other FAANG type companies have a close TC though more of it is comprised of stock
Business experience plus DS is going to be invaluable you should be able to double TC in 3-5 years. Several of my directors over the past few years had an MC background then went F500 with DS and routinely have offers north of 500.
My own background is MC (strat/innovation/ design with a digital transformation and analytics bent) and I pivoted full on to DS 7 years back hitting Partner at a boutique. Since then I’ve hit EC at a Fortune 500, EC at a high growth startup, and now AWS. You’re around the same age I was at during my pivot so I’d say it’s well worth it if you can suck up that you’ll have to bring up your technical acumen and that’ll be a lot of late nights and weekends for a year or so
Glad I could help. I'm very biased as I went down the DS route but the SWE route is better if you want to be in an IC role. I'll let folks with a proper eng bg elaborate on swe but for DS having a business bg and going down an applied DS route will help you stand out. Lots of ways to get the DS training you need so if you want resources reccos just shout and I'll point you to what my teams have used or where I hire from.
Most modern high end Bi leadership roles are going to require DS experience to be relevant so I'd argue caution there... but applied DS is much closer to BI as it typically sits in the business and with leadership rather than IT and is focused on driving actual actions and recommendations, or "product" centered DS solutions. Personally I'd argue a MC bg will also help you in leadership DS roles as 90% of the battle is getting the business case sign off for adoption and understanding business process changes and change mgmt required to driving things forward. Building models, feature eng, data pipelines is actually the easy part.
By the way, you’re all awesome for taking the time to answer my amateur questions!
Hi OP, can you share more about what your role encompasses? Trying to understand what my options for progression would be a few years down the road.
Facebook allows remote for E5 and up which your YOE would fall under. A lot of companies I’ve interviewed with also allow remote
Are you sure you want to restart in DS/SWE? Why not leave as a BIE manager?
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D1 you've got it. It's essentially all the scripting associated with reporting rolled into one role. More infrastructure focus than a BI analyst, but not as much as a DBA or SWE.
Don't see why you wouldn't just leverage your BI & analytics background leading those types of teams to expand to leading advanced analytics teams. The work is related and if you really have good BI & analytics knowledge you should pick up advanced analytics quickly. The leaders in the space already incorporate advanced analytics into a lot of their COTS products at this point. You could make a lot of money getting stuck into that and implementing it at other F500s. Can you get involved in the advanced analytics group in your organization? Is there one? If not, see what's possible for starting one up. It makes not too much sense to me to completely switch when you can leverage your current position and responsibilities to move into move senior leadership opportunities which would include possibly data science components.
OP, is 250k your base or is that Total Comp (with bonuses)?