Worried about career stagnation
Hi all, I graduated last year and have been working for a couple months now in the Bay Area for a pretty decent team, especially by Amazon standards. However, I’m afraid of career stagnation because I want to work on ML/big data, and currently I’m working as a backend dev writing new java apis that I copy-paste from existing code. Often I’m left bored without much assigned work. I’m afraid I’ll never get to work with large amounts of data or distributed systems which seem to be critical skills. Is this a valid concern? What skills should a new grad be trying squeeze out of this kind of job, given my career aspirations? It’s true I could switch teams after a year but I think I would enjoy work at a mid-size startup more than AMZN, so that’s where I’m aiming to be in the near future. Appreciate the help.
Chill out. The pace of you career won’t be the same as the frantic data shoveling of the last few years. You made it. Take a big breath.
Tech moves at such a frantic pace tho... I just don’t want my skills to become irrelevant and be stuck doing what I’m doing rn
If you are on ML or AI you are on the most interesting subject right now. It’s fairly common for new graduates to have a fear of failure because they don’t have exams and don’t understand that judgment time is over. Refocus to making yourself into an adult. Savings, family, homemaking, friendships and work relationships are now your core topics.
I mean that’s such a wide breadth of topics from Data Engineering to Data Scientist to SRE/Platform Engineers I would say try going to a Platform team because much of the tools you will touch overlap between Data engineering and Data scientist
Welcome to real life.
You graduated last year for god's sake..
I think OP sees all the hype about it. There isn’t many conferences about the latest java backend framework lol
Yup been doing that, I was exaggerating a bit about copy-paste
Look at a9 or aws teams in Bay Area. A9 has lots of big data and ml work
At every company I've worked at, big or small, there are teams that have more work than they have time to do. Go find a ML oriented team and ask if they want a volunteer to do a 20% project. I know my team would be happy for a volunteer.
1 it’s good that you feel this way, means you’re not prone to getting lazy 2 you’re young, this is a normal situation, focus on developing your skills and worry less about where you are vs where you think you should be.
this is why imho new grads should never work for a bigco
Amazon is a dead-end job.
Why do you say that?
Also curious