gmtx725

This topic seems to come up time and time again on here. As someone young and new to the industry I have only ever experienced open plan offices, so I don't really know what the alternative is like. However I'm inclined to say I don't think I would enjoy cubicles or private offices. I feel like you'd miss out on so much collaborative effort and serendipitous & spontaneous conversations with colleagues that solve problems out of the blue. I also think it's just plain isolating being on your own in a room all day. What's wrong with just putting some headphones on if you want to put your head down and do some deep, quiet work?

Having said all that as I admit I haven't experienced the alternative so I'm open to being convinced I'm wrong.

I'm a Data Scientist from an academic background in AI with 4 years experience, working mainly in geospatial analytics, with some basic DL (and a lot more cookie-cutter import sklearn style ML). Lots of spark & bigger datasets. However recently I've started to feel limited by my future options in DS, and have realised I actually enjoy building things more than I enjoy tuning models and playing around with data. I want to transition to more of a dev role perhaps via some kind of ML Engineer position, but I'm not quite sure how.

I think it's definitely doable- i wouldn't want to claim my engineering skills are up to a fully professional standard but they are definitely better than 90% of the other DS people I've worked with. In past roles in small companies I've had more of a wide ranging role and have written APIs to serve model predictions, written tests, worked with CI/CD etc. I think given a couple of months in a dev role I could get myself up to scratch. It's just getting that role that could be difficult. I think there may potentially be opportunities in my current company to transition to a more Data Engineer style position but it would probably mean a big salary cut and the projects in the pipeline don't sound that thrilling. Anyone made a similar transition or wants to share their thoughts?