it just depends on what fits with your
personality what fits with your goals
and what you want to get out of life
Stockton's carb-free during office hours
and he mentioned a book I think was
called range I personally haven't read
the book so I don't want to comment on
it I'm sure it's good but essentially
it's saying that if you want to be more
successful don't specialize don't double
down on learning more and more about the
same thing be a broad generalist so I
wanted to share a little bit about how
you move your career forward and the
different options you have and why you
see people saying contradictory things
because there's different ways to be
successful first off I have talked about
this before but you can think of your
skillset as being t-shaped right this is
this is how you essentially want to
start your career there's different ways
to do it but in data science this is the
breadth of your skills so this is like
you know a lot of different things about
different areas about you know data
cleansing a software engineering
statistics machine learning business
acumen like you know a little bit about
a lot of different things you've got a
lot of breadth and then this depth here
is just one area of specialization right
this is your superpower that you use
this to leverage that first opportunity
to get your foot in the door and say hey
here's how I'm going to uniquely help
your company be successful because I
have this one particular skill that
other people don't have and I can use
this to solve a problem at your business
that's why you guys are gonna want to
hire me that's why I'm gonna help make
you more successful as you start your
career like everyone has always got some
degree of a t-shaped skill set but once
you get your foot in the door you've got
you kind of got two different tracks so
you can follow so one you can become
more of an expert and focus on being the
best possible individual contributor the
other you can basically become more of a
broad general generalist and go down the
management track so you have to think
about what actually fits your
personality type are you more
introverted you love just learning
things and focusing and actually doing
the work of course then you want to go
down more of an individual contributor
track but if you're more maybe
extroverted
if you get bored easily you love
learning lots of different new things
but not necessarily going super deep on
anything then it's bad
to get a broader skill set then you can
move up to more than a management or
leadership role where you start making
more strategic decisions essentially
what you want to do if you want to go
into management track alright so option
1 management 2 expert individual
contributor and what's cool and data
science is that you can actually make a
really successful career going down
either track if you see it companies
like Google or Allstate they
specifically have separate tracks for
data scientists moving into a management
role or moving into more of an expert
individual contributor role and you can
just keep moving up the levels on these
parallel paths like your manager might
not get paid more than you right you
could be like a level 7 individual
contributor and level 7 it can also be a
manager so you can actually achieve
really high salaries and either of these
and keep moving up your career to an
extremely high level obviously Google is
willing to pay engineers and data
scientists machine learning engineers
and stuff a lot of money there and all
state as well as you keep moving up so
you get those two different options
become more of an expert or become more
of a manager if you want to become a
manager you're basically going to go
wider right you go wider and you try to
get this whole thing to just be like a
little bit deeper right so just keep
getting wider and wider and just slowly
get a little bit deeper and that's how
you're gonna start to movement to more
of a management role because you can
have more perspective you can see that
like the bigger picture and how data
science fits in you can start making
smarter more strategic decisions for the
company and utilizing different people
specialize the skill sets now if you
want to be the next expert individual
contributor you're basically just gonna
go deeper like you're gonna expand your
area of expertise a little bit usually
like you're not just gonna do one thing
forever and you are gonna learn some
additional skills but you're always
going to focus on depth going deep deep
deep so if management you want to go
broad as an individual contributor
you're gonna go deep on your skill set I
just thought this was an interesting
conversation during office hours because
you do see like conflicting advice like
in deep work or so good they can't
ignore you the guys like just go deep
like learn how to focus
learn stuff that's really tough go deep
go deep go deep get so good at something
that you then have career capital people
can't ignore you
you can kind of build that bridge that
way right but there's other books like
no no no that's stupid just learn a
little bit about everything then you can
make strategic decisions and what you
realize is these are just two different
career paths that have to fit for your
personality and your goals and what you
want to do with your life so I don't
want you to feel like you're boxed in
like you have to do one or the other and
of course as you move up like you'll get
opportunities to manage other people if
you're good and you can decide if you
like it or if you don't like it but
don't feel like there's one path ahead
of you there's different paths it just
depends on what fits with your
personality what fits with your goals
and what you want to get out of life
