My career started really rough, first 1.5 years didn't get a job and I have another 1 year gap. I don't have that luxury. I have experiences in stacks for 6 months tops with most. If it's longer it's an esoteric language. No one cares about my CS degree(s) and the experience I gained there, despite the fact I learned more in some courses than I did in most jobs.

This is the first job I can fully showcase all my skills, so that's amazingly good. In that sense I need to seriously reconsider how I can make a career out of being a data analyst. But I'm not that far in my thinking yet and still see myself as a software engineer for my next job and while this job gives me great skills to learn in marketing and soft skills (and some stats and some dev), it doesn't give enough engineering skills.

As a SWE I'm in an odd place. I have never been in a place where SOLID is a thing. I don't know design patterns that well (I can recognize them and in many cases they make sense). But I have engineered quite a bit and I have seen enough 1 million LoC or bigger codebases.

So I'm still in a bit of a weird in between state and could use some mentoring with regards to good software design and just good ol' engineering, which is why I was thinking to help out with some open-source software or something like that.

I agree that the "always be programming" culture is toxic. It is what it is. I'm the type that just rolls with the punches. Much of my life has been on hard mode for a variety of reasons, so a toxic culture like "always be programming" is honestly not the worst thing.

> I think one of the most toxic things in this industry is that we think we need to continuously be doing coding outside of work instead of living life.

Why is that toxic and what other industries are you comparing that to?

This. I've been in a similar situation working as a data scientist for 2.5 years and went back to software engineering a couple of years ago.

I'm not trying to say that data science and analytics are necessarily bad environments; I just came to realize that I had different expectations for my work than my organization.

While the skills of a software engineer — e.g. quickly comprehending technical references, operating APIs, ability to type more than three lines of code straight — are highly valuable for a data analyst to be productive, I had to realize that my organization did not appreciate the craftsmanship of producing code as much as I still do.

Over time, I had to witness my analyses end up on slides or in Excel workbooks, only to be looked at once. They'd done their job and weren't needed anymore. I was effectively "prompt completing" analytic requests from management to understand the organization/business/whatever better — always with the same result for "my work".

Providing an organization with the intelligence to understand their business is for sure not a bad motivation and can be fulfilling. It's just not a good fit if — instead of the analytics — you consider the software you create for the analytics as your work.

I agree with this. At some point you need to work on a hard project, with minimal support, for an extended period of time. The skills you'll learn will be indispensable. Open source can help, but it's hard to replicate being immersed in a difficult role for 40 hours per week.

The more important thing is that you have a genuine interest in the field, which should take you where you need to go. But without at least a small amount of hard software experience you'll be stuck at an intermediate level.

Aren't certain open-source projects like a job?

I think I explained myself poorly.

> At a large-scale organization, as an SWE, I did far more programming work than I ever did as a DA.

Yea, this is what I meant. The amount of programming I do now as a DA feels low (since I'm a software engineer historically, that's what I meant with "but for a software engineer" - a bit of a confusing sentence). Well specifically, the amount of engineering feels low.

> That said, there are different ways to cope and build skills—it takes time. I do side projects and, more importantly, write about them regularly [1].

Good point, to what extent do employers see this as experience though? It's my experience they don't care at all. Maybe I'm looking at this wrong. The reason I'd do it is (1) I want to keep on building and (2) I want to keep on building experience as a SWE that employers will be impressed by. I'm not sure if I want to switch back, but for now I want to keep that option open.

> More than once, people have reached out with job offers just because they stumbled across my writing on Hacker News or other social media platforms.

I guess you answered your question here. I think it's good enough to test it out :)

> As a DA, I mostly wrote aggregation queries, built dashboards, and did some Python, Pandas, and Notebook munging.

Yea, I see a lot of SQL queries here, notebook stuff (so also Python/Pandas) and dashboarding. It's probably a 50/50 split. I have a suspicion that my manager wants me more on the programming side of things though. So far me as well. I'm allowed to pick any tool I find right for the job. I already wrote a bash script today.

Yea I thought about that, probably game dev from the ground (with my own graphics engine) up or a web app that I find useful (currently no thoughts on that).

> even when doing your day to day data analysis job

This is a bad advice.

Usually coming from an over-engineering mentality (that many engineers suffer from, including myself).

Part of the engineering culture is to find the _right_ solution for the job. Not the most _engineered_ one.

There is no point to shoot at sparrows from a canon.

Yea that's fair, just started, so we'll see. Thanks for the tip though!

That brings up a good point! I could also go the hackthebox.eu route to train my security engineering skills, including cryptopals.

PlayerTwo was still a fun insane box :)