How I Did It: From Psych Degree to VP of Data Science at Top Startup • Hacker News Board

Re: How I Did It: From Psych Degree to VP of Data Science at Top Startup

#41

Post by martingoodson » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 5:50 PM UTC

aogl wrote: post #38

martingoodson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange comment. How could you be a good data science leader if you are not a good data scientist? Could you equally be a good CFO if you didn't have technical skills in finance?

Im afraid that while this seems logical, it's not how the real world actually is. I've known of many heads of departments with rather grand titles and only a very small percentage of them even know the slightest of what goes on below them or why. Heads of IT, software departments and even CIOs that cant even login. In fact, they often move to similar roles in other companies because the new companies believe they mus…

>When in fact the current company just can't wait for them to go.

You seem to be agreeing with me then. Of course you can be a bad VP Data Scientist without knowing anything about data science!

Re: How I Did It: From Psych Degree to VP of Data Science at Top Startup

#42

Post by gumby » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 5:50 PM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #30

syndacks wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this community (HN) have such a proclivity for these types of bitter responses? This comment makes wild assumptions, doesn't assume best intentions, and really just makes `brenden2` sound like a nasty person. Yet here it is, top comment on the front page. Nice work OP! You are flexing a very unique set of muscles (technical + leadership + communication + ambition) that very few people have. You will go far i…

Why do you perceive it as bitter rather than simply factual observations about employment? It is a whole discipline of social science research, eg “Moral Mazes.” My personal goal is for my beliefs and my participation in a community to above all be accurate . If the fact-based conclusions aren’t very pleasant, that is a function of the state of the world, not the state of participation.

Thank you for this comment.

Re: How I Did It: From Psych Degree to VP of Data Science at Top Startup

#43

Post by martingoodson » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #40

martingoodson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange comment. How could you be a good data science leader if you are not a good data scientist? Could you equally be a good CFO if you didn't have technical skills in finance?

>How could you be a good data science leader if you are not a good data scientist? The job of a Data Science leader at a growing company is 50% recruiting and 50% sitting in planning meetings. Even if you started with good IC knowledge after a few years your skills will be rusty as hell. So assuming you know nothing and trusting your team and delegating is going to work infinitely better than trusting your own out of…

>your own out of date skills

Good scientific skills never go out of date. Being a good data scientist is not the same thing as knowing the big data framework du jour.

I accept that in many cases people with the job title 'data scientist' do not have any scientific skills, but that's a different matter.

Re: How I Did It: From Psych Degree to VP of Data Science at Top Startup

#44

Post by linuxftw » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

dx87 wrote: post #5

When I was doing a cyber training exercise in the military, we had an Air Force general tell us that the best technical officers they had started out with non-technical degrees. They said that officers with undergrad degrees in things like IT, Software Engineering, and Computer Science, weren't very good at thinking outside of the box because everything they did was fairly low level and had a provably correct solutio…

> officers with degrees like psychology and political science were better at taking in large amounts of information

I met plenty of officers with useless degrees that were plenty useless. The people that had non-technical degrees that did well in a technical field would have done just as well without any degree whatsoever. They key takeaway here is that for the vast majority of folks, political science, sociology, or even 'psychology' is a complete waste of time and resources.

> Non-technical students would look at what the result should be, and do whatever was necessary, creating their own checklist as they went along.

This is how you end up with people doing chmod 777, opening up your firewalls, writing for loops in application code instead of a proper select query. Sometimes those checklists are there for a reason. Non technical people don't know what they don't know.

Re: How I Did It: From Psych Degree to VP of Data Science at Top Startup

#45

Post by _2d30 » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

According to his LI, he was a VP at Lazada for 1yr and then became a senior data scientist at another company.

Re: How I Did It: From Psych Degree to VP of Data Science at Top Startup

#46

Post by 7d7n » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 6:05 PM UTC

_2d30 wrote: post #45

According to his LI, he was a VP at Lazada for 1yr and then became a senior data scientist at another company.

Yes I left soon after it was acquired by Alibaba (didn't like the 996) and wanted to put my skills to help in healthcare (in a 10-man startup).

Re: How I Did It: From Psych Degree to VP of Data Science at Top Startup

#47

Post by KineticLensman » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

dx87 wrote: post #5

When I was doing a cyber training exercise in the military, we had an Air Force general tell us that the best technical officers they had started out with non-technical degrees. They said that officers with undergrad degrees in things like IT, Software Engineering, and Computer Science, weren't very good at thinking outside of the box because everything they did was fairly low level and had a provably correct solutio…

I worked in a defence company that had a strong revolving-door relationship with the military: several of our staff were recruited from the military, often because they had good domain knowledge and if nothing else could help translate customer requirements into a language our engineers could understand. Their technical knowledge varied but I never noticed any great correlation between their military trade (let alone their original degree) and their success in the company. However, something that I observed many times was that the effective ones rapidly rose up through the management and sales hierarchies, often I suspected because their extensive leadership and people skills gained in the military, as well as decisiveness, let them run rings around management who came from a purely scientific or technical background. This seemed to be truer of the officers than other ranks, especially those who had left because their military promotions and careers were limited by availability of roles rather than (lack of) competence.

[Edit] - people skills. One ex-military guy who was recruited into my team was asked by corporate HR how he would deal with 'difficult conversations'. His answer had to do with telling people / families that their best friends / relatives (soldiers under his command) had been killed in action, or persuading one of his squaddies not to marry the local prostitute. When I decided to step back from team leadership he was my first choice as my replacement, and later became one of the best bosses I've ever had.

Re: How I Did It: From Psych Degree to VP of Data Science at Top Startup

#48

Post by aerosmile » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

syndacks wrote: post #25

brenden2 wrote: post #12

Getting to VP level at a "top startup" has little to do with data science, and everything to do with your ability to play the networking game. Depending on the size of the company, VP level jobs are more about management skills than technical proficiency.

Why does this community (HN) have such a proclivity for these types of bitter responses? This comment makes wild assumptions, doesn't assume best intentions, and really just makes `brenden2` sound like a nasty person. Yet here it is, top comment on the front page. Nice work OP! You are flexing a very unique set of muscles (technical + leadership + communication + ambition) that very few people have. You will go far i…

Tech startup as a phenomenon of the last 25-ish years is maturing and has become sufficiently mainstream that it has attracted a very wide spectrum of people, so much so that the majority of them are - as you would expect - quite average. It turns out that being average is not enough to beat the odds, and those are quite stacked against early-stage startups. So you end up with fairly low chances of success and the resulting bitterness. As this industry continues to mature, the next step will be calls for regulation, unions, etc.

None of this is new - it's happened to all industries after they became sufficiently mainstream. Take a look at aviation - at first it was the wild west at the beginning of the century, then WW1 and WW2 brought some rapid advances, and in the last 70 years things have been relatively stale. Anyone dreaming of designing the next airliner today is a very different person from those who designed them at the beginning of that cycle.

I am not even saying there's anything wrong with all of this. As an industry matures and becomes more mainstream (aka, affects more people), we have to put some safety mechanisms in place. That means discussions become more about safety and less about achievement, and this attracts a fundamentally different group of people - more average, more bitter.

Kudos to the OP: just like syndacks, I am rooting for him and hope he'll use his enthusiasm to continue to shoot for the stars!

Re: How I Did It: From Psych Degree to VP of Data Science at Top Startup

#49

Post by jjoonathan » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

martingoodson wrote: post #34

dominotw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VP level jobs are more about management skills than technical proficiency. I would say this is true for all mid-management and up. Tech proficiency is largely irrelevant once you go into management.

Strange comment. How could you be a good data science leader if you are not a good data scientist? Could you equally be a good CFO if you didn't have technical skills in finance?

My best manager was my least technical manager. He was really good at getting the right work to the right people, controlling expectations, stopping the clients from burying us under requirements, stopping us from hiding behind poorly phrased requirements, communicating setbacks early to turn them into course-corrections rather than trainwrecks, and juggling lots of constraints and dependencies while planning and rescheduling. He wasn't even an interpersonal wizard, but he was really good at keeping his part of the organization running smoothly. Nothing fell through the cracks while he was in charge, and we were all better for it.

This lies in stark contrast to the three other managers I've had for any length of time, who have all been considerably more technical and considerably less good at those other things. They've been able to step in and help fight fires in a way that the above manager couldn't have, but they haven't been as good at keeping their part of the organization running smoothly. Thing is, the latter is a manager's job, and the former isn't.

I mostly see management and implementation as orthogonal skills, with the caveat that experience is industry-specific in both cases.

Re: How I Did It: From Psych Degree to VP of Data Science at Top Startup

#50

Post by wott » Sun, Mar 01, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #15

brenden2 wrote: post #12

Getting to VP level at a "top startup" has little to do with data science, and everything to do with your ability to play the networking game. Depending on the size of the company, VP level jobs are more about management skills than technical proficiency.

> VP level jobs are more about management skills than technical proficiency. I would say this is true for all mid-management and up. Tech proficiency is largely irrelevant once you go into management.

> Tech proficiency is largely irrelevant once you go into management.

The lack of tech proficiency is even an advantage: in the companies where I worked, it is people who sucked badly at the technical job they had, who were moved to management, hoping that they might be less useless there. They are happy, they are paid twice as much as others who could fulfil their tasks, so it must mean they're good at something (something difficult to assess otherwise so money must be the right measurement). And then, since it is almost impossible to differentiate between a good and a bad manager, they could thrive a few decades going up in those roles, jumping from a company to another, boasting about the number of projects they 'made' (which are naturally more numerous than for the people who actually worked deeply on them).