Ask HN: I realise data science is not for me and feel depressed

I am a fourth year student in Eastern Europe, studying Math and Economics. This is the final year, and I have 3-4 months till graduation. At the same time, I've been working full time as a Data Scientist at a big telecom company for the last several months. And I think it's not for me

The project here is interesting, but I realize that I do not like any of the "real" DS tasks, e.g. anything that involves actually building a model from the statistical standpoint. Now, I write a lot of SQL: the company has hundreds of billions of calling records, so you have to really think about the queries you write, and even if they are quite optimized I still sit here for a long time waiting for the response. And even that is more exciting than any of the statistical tasks I face

Little background: I started coding when I was 16, back then I built an iOS app using Swift to help me learn English vocabulary. After that, I've been coding as a hobby on the side during my studies. I liked mathematics and statistics as a freshman, and during my second year found out about Data Science. Given my background, I thought it would be a perfect fit for me. I built a few pet-projects using ML during my third year, and started applying. They impressed one of the employers (big bank), so these projects basically landed me my first internship, which led me to the current job

The thing I like the most is actually building stuff with my hands, and I think SWE is a better fit here. I guess this is the reason I never liked Kaggle. Also, most of my internship I spent building a simple web interface for the existing model (mostly back, like connecting to DB, transforming data, deploying to Linux, etc), which was 100% SWE task and I liked it. So there were hints along the way...

How would you recommend me to switch to SWE the fastest way possible?

I'm quite depressed now because I've put enormous effort into switching to DS: I applied to 80 job postings before I got my first internship, and I feel this is for nothing now. Also, my university and faculty considered to be really difficult, so studying DS on the side was brutal.

Besides, I live in Russia and want to relocate (for obv reasons), and feel like it's easier with SWE skills (especially given that I know English and in the process of receiving EU passport). This puts an enormous time pressure on me given how the things are playing out now...

I would appreciate any opinion/advice!

The grass is always greener...

But no reason to be depressed. You should be proud about the effort you put into getting this position. It's never lost. I can't speak about your particular situation in Russia, but as far as switching to SWE, it should be easy. Some people switch careers in their 40s. As a young graduate, it's very easy to change path.

This comment is dead on. I’m SWE who builds data/optimization systems and someone with this skill set would be a great hire.

Even if you wanted to get totally away from data most any modern system is going to need to interface with data systems at some point. Your skills would be super valuable.

Can you try to aim for something like an ML engineer to begin with? To avoid overloaded terms let me explain which kind of figure I think of. Specifically, I mean the kind of people that are in charge to take a proven ML architecture, try to apply it to the problem at hand, and potentially work on serving infrastructure to host that model (or plugging it into some Data pipeline for batch use cases).

There is a bunch of pure SWE work in the serving part and still requires some math background that, thanks for your education, you seem to have. This should allow you to get exposure to a lot of pure SWE-backend tasks which could allow for a full transfer into SWEland later on.

However, I am not sure how common these figures are in the industry. I work for a FAANG company as an ML Eng like I described, but I aware that not all companies have such people.

Finally, I wish you the best of luck in getting an EU passport!