Metadata
- Author: Benn Stancil
- Full Title:: Is This a Career?
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Data Team Vision And Mission,
- URL:: https://benn.substack.com/p/is-this-a-career
- Finished date:: 2024-12-13
Highlights
to get reasonably good at most things, all you need to do is put in a moderate amount of intentional practice, and very few people do that. (View Highlight)
most of us, I suspect, are some undecided fourth thing. We are practitioners of these other three things, but unpracticed in them; we aren’t, as Dan Luu instructs us to, actively trying to become great technologists or statisticians. Instead, we drift among them, and define ourselves as analytical generalists, or, even more atmospherically, as “data people.” We would probably say that we are good at critical reasoning, are rigorous and quantitative, are always curious and question the status quo. We are passable programmers and statisticians, and experts in “analytical thinking.” (View Highlight)
Pursuing a career in analytics feels like pursuing a career in “science”—it’s not specific enough to go anywhere. (View Highlight)
I wonder if it can be defined as “analysis of data in fields where it’s not in the critical path to revenue/purpose”. Because when it is, it’s usually baked into our understanding of the domain—econ, bio, transportation planning, policy research, etc. (View Highlight)
they got there by specializing: They committed themselves to finance, or political opinion polling, or baseball, and found their principle identity in that instead of under the vague umbrella of “data.” (View Highlight)
We can’t just be analysts or analytics engineers; we have to decide that we want to be true experts in understanding how to build consumer software first, and product analysts second. Or define ourselves as working in finance, then become an analytics engineer at a fintech company. Because there’s a corollary to Dan Luu’s theory of expertise: While it implies that we can become pretty good at stuff pretty quickly, it also implies that other people can become pretty good analysts. And in almost every field, that combination—a domain expert, and 95th percentile analyst—is almost always better than the inverse. (View Highlight)