One lesson is: even in today’s world, with LinkedIn and websites and blogs and other ways of making ourselves known to the world, personal contacts matter a lot in getting consulting work.
companies want to predict regional electricity demand and/or price and use this to decide when to do things like charge electric vehicles
writing production code, and the tests for the code, is a different skill from conceiving, writing, and testing the models in the first place.
Python doesn’t yet have anything remotely close to ggplot for rapidly making exploratory graphics, for example.
The fact that all of these companies want the modeler to write production code (literally all that I have seen so far) is a problem for me because I don’t like writing production code and I’m not very good at it.
It’s sort of like putting together a football team and requiring that every player be able to play both offense and defense.
Why not let me use my Neanderthal-level programming skills to get my model working, and then pass it along to one of these talented programmers to refactor it into something compact and readable, and write the tests for it?