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Is it the money? Maybe, the potential salaries look amazing.
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Is it to get in the tech industry? Possibly, watching the show Silicon Valley reminds me of The Real World on MTV. The potential for excitement never ends.
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Do you want to learn how to create an app? I mean duhhh. Could you imagine inventing the next Instagram or Tik Tok app and making millions!!!
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Am I having a quarter life crisis? I mean, I am in my mid 30s and seeing these instagram “influencers” in their early 20s traveling the world with no debt is absolutely frustrating. Like how?
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Are you trying to prove to your Indian parents that you are not a failure? This was a tough task from the jump. Soon as I came out of the womb, if I wasn’t in the medical field, computer field or the next prodigy to Einstein, I was deemed a failure. Any body that is first generation American that comes from an Indian family can understand this.
So, why?
Maybe I can explain the “why” if I can first explain the “how”. How did I end up in this situation where I picked data science?
I moved to the Bay Area in 2014 from San Diego. My first job in Silicon Valley was at Google as a contractor. I was a manager for Bon Appetit and was part of the food program and operations. Basically, I help manage people to execute the service of breakfast, lunch and dinner to thousands of “googlers” (this is an actual term which refers to a google employee).
This was my first experience in “tech” but it wasn’t a glamorous position at all. Waking up at 5am and getting to work by 6am just to put out fires for the next 12 hours takes a toll on your body and mind. Employees calling out sick, equipment not working, orders not arriving, the chef isn’t happy because the carrots weren’t julienne cut, upper management breathing down your neck about meeting budget, the list goes on. On top of that, the list of demands and complaints was astronomical. It was actually very exhausting to adhere to all of the ridiculous demands from some of the googlers but ill save those stories for another time. Maybe I’ll title the blog “Kitchen Nightmares” which would make Gordan Ramsey look like a saint.
As I was working in this position, I was always scheming on how I can get to the other side. How can I get to the software side? How can I enjoy all the perks a company is offering? How can I make a ridiculous food demand (I would never do this)? How can I become a “googler”? Well, when you live in the Bay Area, you start hearing about all these software engineering bootcamps and this culture of people “coding”.
This is where I started dabbling in coding and researching these bootcamps. I even took a nightly course for 2 weeks where I learned the basics of Ruby. Hello world!!! I started networking with current and past bootcamp students who were in programs that ranged from three to nine months.
What did I learn? These bootcamps teach you multiple languages. Depending on the specific field you want to enter, you don’t need to learn every single language. If you want to be a front end developer, learn Javascript and HTML. If you want to be a back end developer, learn Ruby or Python. This was my dilemma. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I didn’t want to dedicate 60 plus hours on learning a new computer language for a field I wasn’t going to enter. I didn’t want to just become a software engineer for the money, I wanted to enjoy my career as well.
Fast forward 5 years to January 2019, I find myself working for a autonomous vehicle company Zoox. I was part of the leadership team that helped run operations. I would use a program called Looker which is a data driven application to help run operations. I was excited. Finally found myself on the “other side” working for a awesome startup that was en route to changing the world.
Then it happened. It happened to all of us. Covid. One month after the shutdown started in March 2020, I was out of a job by mid-April. Even though I was working in the “tech” industry, I was still on the operations side of the business. In my opinion, the operations department of any business got hit the hardest with layoffs. I witnessed what fields still had a job (or was more likely to keep a job) during the pandemic. It was the software side in the tech industry.
After the initial shock, disappointment, sadness and anger wore off (took about 72 hours), it was back to the white board. I had a few choices. Go apply to all and every job that was out there and just secure something or take this time to learn a new skill and make a career change. I saw this unfortunate event as an opportunity to finally enter the software side and learn a new skill.
What I know about myself is, I love numbers. My favorite subject is math, specifically statistics. No matter what the topic is, I look for statistics to tell the story. It could be about sports, politics, or how much screen time each marvel character got in all the Avengers compared to pay. This is what I enjoy, data.
At the age of 34, going through a pandemic and losing your job, you start looking at the world from a different perspective. I want a career that has job security and can survive a pandemic. I want the opportunity to work from home whenever I can, especially when I have kids. I want a career that is rewarding and also lands me with a great company that cares about you as a person.
Yes, money is part of the reason along with all the other jazz I mentioned above but there is so much more to it. Except for showing my parents I am not a failure, because I am not. They just want me to be happy. And that’s what I was looking for; something I enjoy to do, happiness and piece of mind in my next career.
That’s why I picked data science.