Data Science leader with 3+ years of experience currently working at Walmart Labs and has worked in Finance on Wall Street previously. I made the transition from Finance to Data Science because I embraced innovation and technologies. I am passionate about making an impact on the company through my work. Ask me anything about compensation, promotions, career development, and tech interviews in Finance, Data Science, and Engineering. Thanks everyone for the questions today. I'm done with answering questions.
How long did you work in Finance for? What was your position in the finance industry?
About 2 yrs. Front office roles
How much DS related activities did you do at the bank? How did you prepare to transition to DS?
Did your compensation (TC) change a lot moving from finance to data science? (for better or for worse?) Additionally, when you made the switch, how was your first yr as data scientist at Walmart Labs? how did that go?
Definitely better. It went very well. Got less limitations applying techniques. The work life balance and culture are much better than finance
What were your hours like in finance vs walmart labs?
Statistics background required? Any bootcamp for the transition or just independent projects?
Did you have any competing offers that you were contemplating before accepting your position at Walmart? Interested in knowing why you selected Walmart for data science!
What was the average work hours per week in finance vs Walmart Labs
70-90 for finance vs 30-40 Walmart labs
What was the average work hours per week in finance vs Walmart Labs
Where are you heading to? Do you want to stay in tech? Go back to a financial firm? Fintech? Start your own consultancy?
Tc at both jobs?
For finance, the TC is usually between 80k to 180k(3 yr experience or less), and it rarely goes beyond 180k but I do have a few friends got 200k to 300k in HF. DS usually goes from 100k to 350k. My TC nearly doubled after the switch.
How much you do you code? What are your deliverables like? Do you work on big data?
Code for most of the time. Mostly ML projects. The dataset is large, but not technically big data
Do you use either spark or scikit-learn?
What did you study in college?
Math and stats