The three questions I asked myself that helped me pick my career path
As you gain experience and progress through your career in data science, at some point you might start hearing or asking yourself this question:
Do you want to move into management?
My boss asked me this question two years ago. At the time I was a senior data scientist. I was successfully leading projects and mentoring junior team members on top of other duties. Since I was already doing a lot of the work of a manager (or so I thought), I didn’t think moving to a management position would be a big change. Plus, I thought a “fancier” title and a pay bump for (mostly) the same work sounded like a good deal, so, even though I never planned on trying to become a manager, I eventually agreed to move from an individual contributor (senior data scientist) to a people leader role (manager data science).
Now, after nearly two years in management, I decided to move back to an individual contributor role. I will share what motivated me to do this later on in this post, but in short, I found that an individual contributor role aligns with my interests…
