warning - random musings ahead that are NOT technical in nature lol
so i’m one month into the job - how has life been?
i think the biggest thing i’m thankful for is a good boss. he’s been extremely patient with me, explaining concepts and breaking things down step by step for me, and tolerant of my (sometimes dumb) questions.
some key points if you’re heading into a new role:
1) always be open to learning. i’ve picked up R, re-visited my excel days (hi vlookup and pivot table), learning how the bloomberg terminal and thomson reuter plug-in work. i’ve had to pick up selenium since scrapy was too painful to install, and oh how can i forget, I’M DOING EVERYTHING ON WINDOWS (!!!)
i do need to say - i understand how difficult it is to shift away from excel. you can keep track of the output at every single step, users can play around with it and see how you actually get to the end data.
on the other hand, even though all the steps are spelt out line for line in say your python code, you don’t actually see how the dataframe transforms unless you print the output at every other step. it’s hard for your stakeholders to learn to see it.
what if they want to see a breakdown of the aggregate? in excel u can double click it and it shows you the breakdown (in a pivot table in another sheet). you just can’t do that in python (yet).
unless you send the whole working file but then, they don’t know how to use it.
there must be a way around this. jupyter notebook?
in other news my ambitious plans of studying ai on the side is somewhat evaporating because of the lack of motivation - i’m just so exhausted learning on job during the weekdays, and also struggling to balance my social life, and household responsibilities.
it’s always a toss up between long term and short term goals, isn’t it.
we were playing this game, and i think it’s so important to assess the current options on the table, rather than going in and getting the short term wins.
how do i learn to strategise? how do i learn to think about what is important in the long run? what i thought was going to be important, didn’t turn out to be so.
i guess to bring this back on track.
what’s important? what do i want to do?
for sure i don’t want to be the person whom everyone goes to just to tweak a little of their report.
i want to help create things that will make people’s lives easier. enabling them, rather than increasing their dependency on me.
i want to think big - but how? what? honestly i don’t know yet what i want to do.
i need to think about this, properly.