I Quit My 6 Figure Data Scientist Job in Tech

hi everyone welcome back to my Channel today I want to share something that's really personal the reasons why I decided to quit my six fig da scientist job in Tech without another one lined up or in the market to look for another job I made this announcement on Instagram a while ago in the video I talked about the main reason being that I didn't feel like I was really making a big impact on society or people around me through the work that I was doing but I feel like a 30second video doesn't really do justice to paint the entire picture picture and the emotional roller coaster that I've been on for a month leading up to the decision point so I wanted to give you a bit more context it was one of the hardest decision that I've ever made so far in my career and probably one of the most important one um I really hope that one day I'm able to look back to this moment and say hey I'm really proud of her for taking that step out of her comfort zone and making the jump and it was one of the best decisions that she could have ever made in her entire career okay let's talk about it before I quit my job I was the perfect 20-some on paper well at least in my parents eyes in high school I took a lot of AP classes I got really good grades I did basketball and tennis and was involved in drama and did volunteer work with Big Brother and big sister so that I could put myself in a good position for a good University and then once I was at the University of Toronto starting my studies in geography and statistics I went to a lot of networking events even as a freshman it was very intimidating but I think you should still do it by the way I did that so that I could get really awesome internship i c emailed my way through seven internships while I was in the school and I did a lot of research as well with different professors all in hopes of getting a good permanent full-time job after University and that's what I did I was able to get my full-time permanent data scientist physici in Tech I was beyond excited I felt like I got my dream job when I was able to land this position after my undergrad a little bit of background for those who don't know my role within the startup is situated within the research team so I worked alongside some of the smartest people um research scientists who were in charge of the machine learning algorithms that we were building and product managers I was also working externally with other teams like the product team engineering team sales team customer success team it was a B2B company in the logistics industry and we provided SAS platform backed by AI for some of the biggest players in the logistics industry all jobs have its up and downs and definitely feel like I'm in a position in my career now where I don't think there is the perfect job or a dream job for my data scientist job I actually have a lot more UPS than Downs I had the full flexibility to work from home I received two performance races within one year and even as the youngest person on the team the only person with a bachelor degree actually on the team every but outside the Masters um I was given equally amount of responsibilities and respect I know this is becoming quite a long intro now but I just want to make sure that I'm giving you as much contacts as possible around my particular situation and make sense of the reasons I'm going to talk about next one of the questions that people asked me the most was probably when did I know for me actually had quite a distinct moment when I realized that oh I think I might have to quit it was a Wednesday afternoon I found myself sitting in the chair of my regular hairdressers this other girl walked in who was also a customer and she sat down and she started talking about the most bizarre and interesting story I've ever heard and it's not just about I think the experience it was also about the way she was telling the story that made all of us relive in the moment step by step with her that was so engaging at at that moment I was like I want be an interesting person like her and that was the moment that I realized hm maybe sitting in front of my laptop every day wasn't it that's not how I'm going to be an interesting person now I've identified my goal I'm going to move towards that direction being in my current job doesn't help me achieve my goal just to give you a little bit more context at that point in my life work was everything to me was over consuming my identity I was so proud of all the steps that I took to get to where I was that I felt like work was who I was even though I had Hobbies I was playing tennis I was hanging out with my friends and I volunteer at the shelter every weekend I still felt like the person that I was wasn't who I want to be if that makes sense so being tied to a computer was weighing me down and that's how I felt and I didn't feel like I could continue doing that I didn't want to be that person who all she talks about is work one of the other Main reasons I left was lack of impact I think there are two aspects to this one is the amount of impact that I'm making through work and the other one is the amount of impact that I could potentially have through the social media work that I'm doing on the side helping people break into data science and in both cases I was measuring my impact through how I felt uh whether I was making a positive contribution to society and direct or indirect feedback that I'm getting from the people that I'm helping so let's talk about my work first because I worked on the research team a lot of the ideas or projects actually get trashed and never push to Market think about companies like maybe Google brain or Chad GPT where we sure gpt3 or gbt 4 is what everybody uses what we see but there's so many other projects before this that were never known to other people who are not working on it and so many ideas were invested but they eventually decided maybe it wasn't a good idea it was a good idea to Pivot and then was trash that was affecting me a lot in my role or in my sense of purpose and who I am I felt a little stuck um constantly going through the loop of having this exciting New Idea propose the idea do some experimental analysis on whether this is a good idea and then go ahead with it and then have the project gets trashed or complete the project and then just have it being shelf I know this is going to be a lot of what I'll be doing as entrepreneur as my next step but in this case I didn't feel like I had a good glimpse of the bigger picture and I didn't have a lot of control over um some of the decisions so because of this day in and day out as I was working on Project I felt a bit defeated and in a sense I didn't feel fulfillment or um purpose and what I was doing the other part was the feedback part sure some of my work was trashed or was not in alignment with where the company Direction was changing into but some of the other projects that did end up going through um I felt like I needed a little bit more feedback I wasn't working on a customer fa and R which is perfectly normal for someone who work on the research team I didn't receive a lot of direct feedback from customers or in this case indirect feedback through all the other layer how it was helping them um in the grand scheme of things around the time I started my job was when I also started sharing my journey on social media uh specifically on Instagram at first I grew from zero to 1,000 followers on Instagram in 5 months but then from 1,000 followers to 50,000 followers it was within a matter of two weeks and so I experienced some success there and I was sharing what it was like actually working on the job as a data scientist how I got into the field how I could get other people into the field as well I started offering my services uh to clients 10one help them bringing the data at various point in their career one person came to me who had 20 years of experience overall eight years of experience in data and he wanted to let that promotion I was pretty nervous going into that one to be honest because I have really bad impostor syndrome and deep down I felt like oh why am I qualified to to tell you what you have to do or it's the same way I feel like who wants to watch my video and um who would want to listen to me talk so that's just impostor syndrome talking but after we got on the call and um helping him throughout the process I felt like hey I was actually really helpful and I helped those people with their career that they wouldn't have had access to otherwise and I reviewed like hundreds of resumés for people to get into Data the amount of positive feedback that I was getting was overwhelming and I'm just so grateful and it was It was kind of contrasting at the moment as well when I was going through this project being trash cycle at work whereas um I'm getting overwhelming positive feedback from people who are help in private sessions or just in general through the content I put out for free on Instagram and YouTube at medium at LinkedIn and this is something I like to call the impact work ratio the amount of impact that you have versus the amount of work that you put in so obviously I was putting in more hours of work at work whereas social media was just something that I do on the site 20 hours 10 hours a week and I felt like I was being making such a bigger impact to actual people and to people in society people around me that was a really empowering feeling and a really really quiet voice in my head is saying look at what you can do now with 20 hours of your time a week imagine how much impact you can make if you do that full- time beside impact uh strive to be interesting person there's also this aspect of personal and professional growth I heard from a podcast yet day something that really resonates with me is that in your 20s you're not really looking for a perfect career you're not looking to settle into your dream job but rather you're looking to acquire a set of skills that Define what your professional Outlook will look like in the next 20 30 years and so it really has the emphasis on learning continually upscaling and just acquiring different skills trying different things which is a big theme for me as well especially in data science with it's so correlated with technology and Ai and the speed of advancement of which those things are progressing is so fast that it requires you to constantly be learning on the job and that's what I like being at the company for 2 and a half years I felt like my growth had slowed down a lot by the end I'm really grateful for the opportunity don't get me wrong at the beginning I was learning a lot of new tools I was learning a lot of new things from people around me me but in a sense I felt like when I progressed over time the 2 and 1 half years I sort of outgrown my environment because of the relatively flat structure usually you get in a startup environment there wasn't really a lot of vertical growth from where I was so just to give a bit more context I was reporting directly to the director or VP of data science but because we were so small there really wasn't like a middle step that can jump into like you would at a Fone company like level 64 just 65 just 66 I didn't feel like I had a clear path going up when I when I asked for a trajectory like what do I need to be able to move up or level up I wasn't getting a clear road map and that's another reason why I felt a little bit stuck in my position um just I didn't really know where I could go from where I was I touched on the misalignment with um company goes briefly earlier this was obviously another reason that was behind decision priorities and Direction con conly change in a startup depending on your financial situations which clients you signed on and where the market Gap is because maybe there is suddenly a new player in the market and that's one of the reason why you have to move fast and ship fast in this kind of environment but also at the time I was starting to seeing pattern in my work when a new cycle starts when I'm working on a new project again um that excitement I'm usually a very positive person and I'm always the one cheering people on I always like try new things but at the start of that cycle I actually found myself become cynical I wasn't sure if this was going to be any different than the previous one and I don't know if we're repeating the same things again repeating the same pattern and I wasn't sure if I wanted to be part of that and that was a clear moment that I realized it was like a wakeup call for me that myself changed because of my job and I'm changing for the worst didn't want to to go in that direction um and that was a very very clear sign for me that it was time for me to leave once I knew that I had to move on from a position that served me very very well that I'm very grateful for for two and a half years the decision came down to whether I want to find another job in a different environment or start my own business I listen to that small voice in the back of my head finding another job in the market would be extremely difficult we've had several rounds of layoffs even people with a lot of experience from Big Tech or across the board in Tech technology are being laid off for no fault of their own so the competition is really Fierce even for someone who has experience but starting a business would be even harder for me because I don't feel like I've actively acquired those skill sets over the past two to 5 years I was practicing data science not how to make sound business decisions or judgments and like my dad worked one job his entire life I didn't come from a business family I don't have anybody who I can look up to in this field and have those Insight all of my friends are happily employed at their 9 to5 so as hard as looking for another job would be I know I can do it because I've done it before starting my own business and really go Full Throttle on social media was going to be harder for me because of all the reasons that I talked about before but I just had this voice in my head that was screaming so loud and quiet at the same time in the back of my head very shy that like I should do it I should make the jump and step out of my comfort zone at the time I was reading a book called when to Jump by Mike Lewis the book consists of a bunch of people who have done this before who have quit their job to pursue their passion if you were thinking about quitting your job by the way I highly recommend the book it really helped me a lot reading that book and reading about other people experiences made me feel like I was ready I saved up enough money to live off off for entire year even if I'm not making a single dime on my side business I tested the water I have started a channel I had a following of 70,000 people across my social media so in a sense that was my MVP I tried something and it worked it felt like the back of my head I have been preparing for this moment among other things timing is very important also I know realistically if I go look for another job I would want to stay there for a couple of years I'm in my mid 20s now and in a committed relationship before I know it I know it's going to be time to start a family and then there are going to be other people to take care of and to feed right now I can selfishly live life for myself and I'm so grateful for that I don't take it for granted any day because I don't have kids to raise or family to feed there really isn't a better time to try this thing and take a r even if I lose everything I go back to where I was 3 years ago in your 20s it's not too late to start over at the end of the day I decide to listen to my inner voice start my own business so what am I going to do next is I I am still going to constantly help you guys and post on social media on Instagram YouTube medium and Linkedin I know this is a major pivot on my channel I've been sharing a lot of day in the life videos of a data scientist and I really enjoyed filming those kind of videos but I don't plan to Pivot from the data field I'll continuously to share how you can break into data science and sharing more coding projects well I am also building my startup portfolio method where it has the potential to help millions of people to get started on your data science portfolio projects I think having a project was really beneficial to me and one of the main reasons why I got hired right out of bachelor's degree among other people who have master's degrees I was able to Showcase my skills as opposed to telling people hey I can do this they can see what I can do um and so I'm really passionate about helping others as well it's not live yet but if you want to be a beta tester or get notified when we launch make sure you join the weight list so yeah I'm really excited for what's to come let me know what type of content you guys would like to see more of I also plan to do more like business related content maybe Dan of what it's like quitting your 9 to5 and working for yourself full-time the transition if you guys want to see more and or if you want guys want to see more data science content or coding tutorial content or portfolio project content let me know in the comment below and make sure you like this video it's going to help me a lot and I'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Maggie In Data

Views: 11,320

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Id: N5LAj-r0No4

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 07 2024