I realise data science is not for me and feel depressed

Firstly, finish your degree.

For most employers, just checking off the degree is more important than exactly what it is. This is especially true for software engineering. You will have many, many coworkers who have degrees in physics or bioinformatics or mathematics and work as SWEs. Most of their stories will be exactly the same as yours, although "...but there weren't any good paying jobs so..." will be in the running.

You have just started your career. I have plenty of experience in software dev, having hired, managed, coded etc, your future isn't anywhere written in stone as you'd think. You seem very worried about the situation and it's definitely clouding your mind. Drink some tea and breath, all is good(as it can...)

It doesn't matter if you degree is in math if you want to work anywhere in computing: software engineer, data science, AI, IT support or anything. If you dislike working with Data Science feel free to try different jobs.

I'm a foreigner living in Germany and to net a job here you likely need some sort of seniority(read: 4 years working in X Programming language or something from DS) before people start considering you, but given how I know how living in a third world country feel like, and how ambitious people usually are when they live in such conditions, I believe you'll do just fine.

Try different things in IT. If you think SWE is a path, try it! Don't feel too attached to present outcomes, let's say you end up needing 1 year to find an internship in SWE, just accept and go with the flow. Of course, that is considering you are eating properly and surviving.

I know we can't choose like rich american kids, but you definitely have a great future ahead of you and many options

If you want we can have a call(email on bio) and you can ask any questions, I relate a lot to having the same kind of questions when I was at university and I wasn't even dedicated or successful as your beginning. I just stuck at it for a while and did what had to be done and I'm here Today, I work for a company, get paid well, live in a first world country and I believe all of this is in your reach, just enjoy the current moment as well, don't live in the future. Enjoy the adventure.

Your degree does not define you. People change careers regularly, and by the time they’re 40 they might be so removed from their degree that it becomes nothing more than an interesting topic for a party conversation. “Oh, I majored in so-and-so, can you believe it?”

The only way you can screw up is by staying in a field long after you’ve realized it’s not for you. It’s crazy to keep doing something you don’t want to do, for your entire working career. Whether it’s from the sunk-cost fallacy or feelings of shame or just complacency, it’s a sad thing.

It takes courage to be honest with yourself and make a change.

(I’m in marketing now but got a brutally difficult degree in naval architecture. Can you believe it?)

I can't speak about the technical side of the equation, but I'm someone who also worked very hard in a field before switching career and I get feeling like your previous efforts were for naught, so I wanted to weigh in. I can only tell you that the work you put in wasn't for nothing, even if it feels like it for now.

You're learned things about yourself (what works for you, what doesn't, and why). You've learned how to apply to job posting and the best ways to do so. You've acquired work experience and human experience which will serve you. Your university and faculty allowed you to learn how to handle high levels of work. You acquired a work ethics and a discipline which will be precious to you. You didn't put all that effort in for nothing: you grew, and you have a life experience which will be precious in your future job interviews (and in your future work!)

My previous experiences couldn't be more different from what I do now, but I still feel how important they've been to me: they shaped my mind, my way of thinking/analysing problems, and my ability to learn. I wish you the best of luck!

There's many Data Science role which are actually poorly understood Data Engineering roles which it sounds like you "might" like more - dealing with pipelines, writing a lot of sql, wrangling bad data, making it go fast and scale for some platform engineering team.

I think you put a lot of effort in, and as a result you learned where your real passion lies. Good!

Many people I know, including smart ones, took a lot longer than you to find out what they would like to do than you. You may found further areas (other than SWE, or other sub-parts of computer science) that you may like even better, and life is long enough to try 2-3 things.

Finish your degree, because it's always good to finish what you start: people who do not know you will have to judge you by your paperwork, and if they can see "whatever he started, he finished, and he did so well" that is going to help you later.

I read your post carefully and you wrote that you like making things. Have you considered doing software development for embedded systems? In that space, you can interact a lot with physical systems, which you might like - whereas in other parts of SWE you often work on cloud machines that you will never see or touch.

I would consider it one of your specialties as a SWE. There are plenty of startups that would love an engineer who understands data, considering how devastating a bad SQL query can become over time, and how difficult it is to verify data.

For your next job just find a developer position.

Finish your degree and don't sweat about your current job (not making little of the dire situation in your part of the world ofc). 90% of the Data Scientist work is Data Engineering so you are doing the right thing. Kaggle and others are like conferences - there are specific trainings if you wanna do good in a conference that won't get you far ahead on the job life. You can do both. Don't tell people that you are not fit for DS before they telling you what they are looking for tho. As to switch to SWE after your degree, keep doing what you do - experiment and apply. Be safe.

As others have said, lots of really good SWE people started out with degrees in other things. I’d normally say finish your degree because in the short term it’ll be easier than having to explain things in every interview and open doors to larger places that don’t care about explanations. Longer term it can matter less by making sure to build up a portfolio of successful projects and keep learning.

On the other hand, the situation right now changes things and I can’t in good conscious recommend that to someone in your position. It’s a weighty decision and you have to make it based on what you think is right for you.

If you’re interested in working on Cloudflare on R2 (which is my team), Workers (my org) or anything else, shoot me an email at my HN username without 123 (vlovich) at cloudflare.com.

Edit: also feel free to reach out and I can share my personal email if you want to just chat more generally. My family escaped Russia in the 90s.

It sounds like you'd very much enjoy working as a data engineer. Data engineers are actually more in demand than data scientists in most place right now, so you're in a good position if you choose to go down that path.

Can you try to aim for something like an ML engineer to begin with? To avoid overloaded terms let me explain which kind of figure I think of. Specifically, I mean the kind of people that are in charge to take a proven ML architecture, try to apply it to the problem at hand, and potentially work on serving infrastructure to host that model (or plugging it into some Data pipeline for batch use cases).

There is a bunch of pure SWE work in the serving part and still requires some math background that, thanks for your education, you seem to have. This should allow you to get exposure to a lot of pure SWE-backend tasks which could allow for a full transfer into SWEland later on.

However, I am not sure how common these figures are in the industry. I work for a FAANG company as an ML Eng like I described, but I aware that not all companies have such people.

Finally, I wish you the best of luck in getting an EU passport!

1) as others have said, get your degree.

2) look at data engineering

Either on specific jobs or systems (map/reduce, streaming, databases etc).

Three, you have been given a gift. You know what you don't want and some things about what you do. Nothing you did was a waste. Focus less on the specific goals and be in the moment. It is great that you have industry experience, even before graduation. That is where you will do/did a whole bunch of learning. Also, don't let this specific job color your whole view of DS.

Peace

Agree with other posters : finish your studies. Get the badge for your CV.

Have you considered ML Engineering? This involves integrating models into applications so that might satisfy your urge to create rather than analyze & model?

First bit of advice, you're so close to graduation make sure you stick with it and graduate - finishing your course shows that you can learn and that you see things through.

Once you've graduated don't let the fact that your work experience is Data Science based put you off for applying for SWE positions. I've worked with a lot of software engineers whose education is in a different field, so switching over is certainly possible.

Congrats, you're better than most university students I know!

Being so much close to getting your degree, get it! You are almost there!

Besides, when you have your degree you're going to be above your (average) peer because of your real-world experience in Data Science.

If you can continue working and get your degree that would be superb. Once you have 1 year of experience, I think you could search for much better jobs.

My advice here would be to try to move your career path to Machine Learning Engineering. It is a relatively-new mixed-discipline, mostly SWE with some DS and DevOps. There is a coursera course that treats these topics, take a look to it once you have your degree [1]. There is also need for backend engineers with some DS skills. Try to learn Django/Flask/NodeJS/Go and with your DS experience, you're good to go.

Also, get out of Russia as soon as you get the degree and also, get the EU passport as fast as you can. The political situation is going to deteriorate in the following months. In fact, I would try to immigrate to the EU once you have your degree.

Advice for your future job searchs: Do not get un-motivated or depressed because of not passing the interviews (not I don't use the term "fail"). Most positions are already assigned and the rest of the interviews are a way to avoid nepotism claims or other criticism (or even legal repercussions). You won't pass 90% of your interviews, not because of your skill-set, but because there are a miriad of reasons for you to don't be chosen: another candidate is better/asks for less money, position is canceled, HR don't click with you, etc. Don't get discouraged and assume you're going to have to make many interviews to get a position, that's the game (unless you have FAANG experience), I'm afraid.

Good luck and keep rocking!

[1] https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-en...

Do not transition to SWE thinking it will be more "interesting" or "fun". Although it appears to the outside that SWE is more interesting/fun, that's only true at junior levels, when no one expects anything out of you. If you want to progress in your career, you will have to transition to a senior engineer (needs to get things done with the least creativity possible) or management (spends all day in meetings). Every career path leads to this, even data science.

Agreed with the current top-level comment: finish your degree. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to move around early in your career. I have a degree in supply chain management and started as a supply chain analyst, but now I am a data engineer and operations researcher.

I too have worked as a Data Scientist but grew bored of it. You can get 95% of the way there on most DS problems by throwing a linear algorithm (favorites being GLMs and GAMs) or Random Forest variant at the data you have, and maybe doing some hyperparameter optimization with k-folds or similar. I've found the data engineering aspect of data science to be far more beneficial...you'll get far more out of thoughtful feature engineering than you will out of algorithm or hyperparameter tweaks. Leave those to the PhDs.

The second thing I would point out is that if you really do love Math and solving hard problems, you may want to start looking into Operations Research (aka Mathematical Optimization). There are tons of really cool problems to work on that will actually stretch your imagination. And unlike Data Science, where a quality resume reads like "I increased accuracy by 23%", a good Operations Research resume reads like "I saved my employer $300M dollars a year". Those are real numbers from a previous job, BTW...even incredibly efficient companies have lots of low hanging fruit where massively impactful decisions are still being made using human intuition or other suboptimal heuristics. Again, finish your degree, but if it is someone you'd like to look into, there are ways to find jobs that will get you adjacent to and perhaps directly working on Operations Research problems.

Data science is an oversold profession. When studying it, you learn really cool things; Bayesian models, reinforcement learning, AI, all the trendy stuff. In reality, most of the data scientists end up spending almost all of their time interacting with horribly designed, decade(s) old databases and the analysis part of their job is mostly just plotting the mean as a function of time and doing logistic regression over and over again.

Hi there, as others have said, finish your degree!

Second: Nothing is for nothing! :)

You learned something, you learned you didn't like something after you thought you did. Welcome to the rest of us, this is completely normal. It happens to many, many people.

Now you are in an exceptionally great position to switch to something else with little to no effort.

Data engineers or even ML engineers, people who combine in depth knowledge of data, statistics and SWE are probably one of the hottest job candidates globally right now. There are absolutely not enough of them.

I am based in Berlin, where you will easily find an internship or entry level job in data engineering or backend engineering with your degree and a EU passport. Also, we have a sizeable amount of Russian expats in Software Engineering in the city, so after living here a bit and networking within the Russian community you should be able to quickly improve your choices of places to work at.

If you want, feel free to send an email to gbx the "at" sign mailbox dot org. Happy to answer any questions about Berlin you might have and put you in touch with a Russian ex-colleague who's in Backend.

A thought: what you have is a particular set of skills. What you do with those skills may bring you more fulfillment than the act of using them.

Maybe telecom isn't for you. Maybe you'd find happiness in doing data science for an NGO that is saving lives in Africa, or an early startup that needs their second "data and data infrastructure" person to get the company bootstrapped. Or maybe not- that's just one thing you think about.

At the same time, nothing is wasted. You've learned stuff. Hopefully, you will continue to learn stuff your whole career, your whole life. If it happens that the first major skill you learned wasn't the one most critical to your career, that's okay.

Graduate with your degree. It serves as proof that you can learn stuff and not have your life fall apart for a few years.

I feel similarly about data science and I'm already a few years into it. But I don't think that's too relevant. Also, I don't get how people can study at university and work full time but I've heard that a few times from Russians so I just assume that it's a thing.

Positives for you:

- you're still at university and you already have work experience

- you haven't sunk years into a career you don't like

- you're employed and earning some money

- you're figuring out what's for you and what isn't

- you have some coding experience

It really seems like you should look for a SWE job, I don't think there's much more to it. What makes it difficult is everything that's going on in Russia and the fact that you want to move to a different country. But on every other dimension it seems like you're in a great spot.

My background is actually in Physics where DS seems an obvious choice. Although I didn't like experimental Physics much where people do lots of statistics. So I tried to shift focus on DS but I never really got off the ground, usually when I had the chance to work on something DS related it wasn't fun at all. (Also as you mention, model building seems not to be too popular) So I worked for years as Full stack engineer but shifted towards Backend. That I find most rewarding, sounds like Backend is also interesting for you. So I recommend applying there, I think the hiring stage is still competitive for people starting but far less then DS

A lot of people have given good specific advice, so, let me point out that you are young, and while you may not like your exact specialization right now, you've still got quite a base of skills that can be leveraged into numerous other positions. Try to not feel bad. Try to let the large number of options given in other posts here some time to sink in, and marinate your subconscious in the realization that you are not trapped, but in fact standing in front of a wealth of opportunities.

You have to soak your subconscious in that information because it is slow to realize things like this, and it needs to be reminded many times a day for a long time. This is the core of truth behind the "self-affirmation" self-help movement. As with many other self-help movements it oversells what it can do, but it can do this. You will need to repeat to yourself many times that you have many options. Your conscious mind may feel stupid, but your subconscious needs to hear this many times, so consider doing it.

The first opportunity didn't work out. That's fine. Frankly, it almost never does. Careers often need a few years to get going anyhow. Remember that coming out of school and getting the job you're going to have for the rest of your life is the exception. Even the people going to FAANGS or whatever the acronym is this week often burn out and leave and do other things, after all.

I think some of the other posts have covered advice regarding the transition to SWE very well.

You write you are: > in the process of receving EU passport

This threw me off somewhat. Does this mean you're an EU member state citizen currently living in Russia and applied for a passport in your home country? I'm not sure I understand what you mean otherwise. Aquiring citizenship (for a passport) is either very expensive or requires permanent residency for a number of years.

[edit] For clarification I changed EU citizen to EU member state citizen.

Well, if you're interested in a fullstack job, we're hiring at Gouach in Bordeaux (France) and are looking for people who like to build, and like to tackle climate change and sustainable mobility :)

https://gouach.com and https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/companies/gouach/jobs

Lots of good advice given. I echo what many have said about Data Science..it's an overloaded phrase that means anything and everything to everyone. It's important to understand the context in which that the person is applying it.

I did a mid-career change from working decades applying advanced control theory to Data Science. The transition was very natural in that many of the curriculum and principles taught overlapped naturally with Data Science (what it was called at that time). To me, I stress the SCIENCE part of data science that involves designing experiments, developing theory, writing the code/drivers needed to drive the hardware, building the hardware, etc. Unfortunately, my definition has become the outlier. Side note...I have noticed that DS is becoming interchanged more and more as a very advanced BI/BA role, which further dilutes the conversations. Basically, what I'm getting at is that it's never too late to change...just gotta keep asking questions and failing (in a good way).

I'm glad you realized this earlier rather than later. Based on your ideal job description, I think you would make an ideal back-end developer...possibly full-stack?

Good luck!

I don't know about the job market in Russia, so my perspective may not dircetly apply to your situation.

In my experience, smaller companies might be more for you. The job positions are often more versatile and varied. I imagine you are more likely to find a job there where you can combine SWE with your DS knowledge and still like it. In such companys your tasks typically require you to solve real business problems all the way through, for example: "We have some sales data. Can you write us a tool that helps us decide where to focus our marketing efforts?"

But firstly, as others have pointed out, since you already invested a lot of time into DS, finish your degree as fast as possible, and then take the opportunity to build a portfolio (even if it is pure DS) and a professional network to help you find a better job. I do not think that it should be too difficult to transition into SWE with a DS degree; and after a few years of professional activity, no one is interested in what you have originally studied anyway.

> How would you recommend me to switch to SWE the fastest way possible?

First thing you should do is see if you can pick up an SWE job with your current skills. When I got my first software job (in 1996, writing test scripts in the aerospace industry) all I knew was a little bit of matlab, basic and pascal. See what's out there! There's more to software than FAANG

There is so much more to software development than just data science. I think you haven't been introduced to any interesting systems projects.

Maybe try to work on a database or a compiler for a few months if you can manage the time? OS projects work too, but it's more difficult to readily find interesting OS projects nowadays.

Congrats on the progress you have made, and also for realising what your preferences are.

First: Finish your degree - a valuable and important signal to employers is that you finish things, not start and stop whenever you have a change in emotion. It's ok to feel discouraged sometimes, but it's never ok to quit what you're supposed to finish.

Second: Your data science experience is very valuable already, and so once you start learning SWE, you have a good mix of skills that many of your peers with only data science or SWE won't have.

Third: I still like Ruby on Rails for web app development, and there is still a ton of opportunities out there for employment on it. So think about learning that. To incorporate data science into web apps for production, there are a lot of options, and Rails will keep you productive with moving forward and learning more in that field.

Good luck, and congrats on your upcoming graduation!

1) Finish your degree 2) Get a entry level role in SWE or internship (your degree is very compatible with that) 3) Program something you can demonstrate in the mean time (will help get you in the door and build skills) 4) keep building and applying 5) realize you might not like SWE either, that’s okay you can switch again.

I don't think anyone doing full-time data analysis at a telecom will think "this is what I want to do in life."

It looks like you've done almost all the hard work on something valuable. One boring job shouldn't discourage you from an entire career path. Similar data analysis techniques can give you very interesting results.

It's easy to extrapolate your first job into your career, but that's almost never, ever the case.

Now, to answer your question: how to switch to SWE the fastest way possible: In your current job, and in the time you have left at school, optimize for the next job you want. Do you have any projects in either that could be done with more or less software development? I suggest you try as much software development as you can. Keep doing this at work after you finish school, too. That'll start steering the boat in the direction you want. It won't take much, there's plenty of demand for SWEs, so the more you can show you can do, the more you'll find demand for it.

Your biggest asset for switching to SWE is what you're about to complete, and the work you're already doing. You just have to finish filling in your resume with more SWE work.

Also, keep doing side projects, and if possible, open source them on github and they start becoming a portfolio to show alongside your resume.

Also, data science uses a lot of software. You can start adding to, or writing your own tools to help your day job. Even if it just makes the SQL better. You can generate SQL, or depending on your DBMS, add new functions to the SQL system that you can then use. Again, the reason for that isn't just to do your job better, but to make a better demonstrable SWE skillset. After you get your data back from SQL, can you do some post-query analysis in another environment, like python+pandas or apache spark? That's all software development, and frankly can be easier to do than trying to do some analysis in SQL alone.

>How would you recommend me to switch to SWE the fastest way possible?

It's very simple - finish your degree then apply for intro SWE positions. You'll have no problems with your background and skillset. You'll find other people with math degrees working as SWEs in industry.

Just make sure to finish your degree.

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Finish your degree, doesn't matter if it's Math and Econ, lots of these majors get into software as a profession.

If you have experience with SQL and are good at it you can find work everywhere with that alone.

If you want to become more full stack learn one of the more popular web app front ends, however I will note that I've used SQL for nearly three decades, the only other tech that I can think of that existed in 1992 and is still fairly mainstream today would be shell scripting and PHP. All the modern web tech, javascript-y stuff is shifting sand and it will change or be replaced as fast as you can become competent at it. It's exciting at first, then frustrating, then demotivating. Or at least that's how it seems to me.

I work with data scientists, SWEs and various flavours of engineers.

My advice would be to finish your degree. You're close and it's worth it.

After that, branch out into some specific domain that interests you. It will give you an incredible edge over all vanilla DS / SWE people. Plus, it'll make work interesting.

Pure SWE after a while will give you the same feeling as you're experiencing now. You're just building web apps for some startup dweebs, or shuffling endless Java classes in some grey corp.

So yeah. DS skills will come in handy, so will SWE skills. Great to get that base in your education. But long-term, find an interesting niche and get good at it. Just not anything super-obscure as not to limit your options too much.

Good luck!

My heart says ML/DS, but when I start learning my brain says stop it :) If you do not enjoy it, give a pause and relax. ICT is huge and spans across different industries/domains, with many different roles and responsibilities. Start as a SWE of anything you are familiar/comfortable with, after gaining noticeably experience, change to the role/domain/technology of your choice. Always remember today’s greatest technology might turn to a legacy/irrelevant after 5 years. Your foremost goal is to finish your degree, unless you have a quest to start your own business. Then get a decent SWE job to gain industry experience.

Take up a specialty that sits somewhere between SW and Data Science? I'm a freelancer specializing in knowledge graphs and see a world of promise in this area. It's still a very young area but promising. Get deep on some graph databases, learn the ropes with W3C semantic web, and start looking for companies that have ongoing graph/semantics projects. All the big tech companies have significant investments in this area, Pharma and science are not far behind, enterprise will bring be joining in soon as they realize their data landscapes are hopeless. And of course, finish your degree.

European companies are desperately looking for IT people. Try smaller companies, not just the well-known ones to get started. Some even take on people before/without a graduation if the coding is good. All the best!

The work may sometimes involves SQL, and that's very good knowledge. You can get lost in optimizing the queries, and it can even become it's own line of work. We used to call them DataBase Administrators, and I guess the job may still exist somewhere. However, you should be careful a lot of places in the industry are actually hiring for a position called Data Analyst which is sometimes confused for Data Scientist, or the reverse where an analyst is hired for DS role...

Finish your degree, obviously... you can pivot to other jobs if you like, but once you find a real DS role it may improve.

Few things you learn are ever truly wasted. Especially DS knowledge when you are switching to software engineering. I know data science and machine learning are all the rage right now, I work in a data science unit and assist the really smart phds around me and build the platforms they are working on. Be happy that you found out know and not later. Software engineering is amazing. You can do infinite things and your actually building stuff. Sorry that you don't feel good about it right now but building things is so much fun and so rewarding, you are going to be okay!

First, as everyone here said: finish your degree, it will surely help with relocation and job search.

I have a very similar experience to yours (didn't like the analytics side of Data Science) and my advice would be to look into ML engineering roles. ML engineering is heavily SWE-oriented, sort of an intersection between Data Science and Software Engineering. I switched to ML engineer and I totally love it, you get to learn tons of cool SWE stuff (Docker, kubernetes, linux, cloud, ci/cd) and you're still close to newest ML research, which I love :)

I was a CS major and during my first "real" internship, I was feeling the same way. I dreaded coming to work. It was a long day. I was working in a windowless office, writing PL/SQL to generate reports and trying to learn COBOL for some legacy billing system. I was not offered full time work, fortunately. Everything worked out when I got a job doing Web Development with .NET and JavaScript. For me, just the change in technology was enough. And I needed to grow up a little more. I still work as a developer and my days fly by.

I studied maths too, then spent 2 years in a data science role and in the last few months moved to data engineering which has aspects of both DS and SE and turned out to be what I wanted to do all along.

hello!

finish your degree as other people said!

most of my friends pivoted HARD after graduating to something completely different: think geology--> marketing, neuroscience--> UX, etc.

find the components of the job you like, and try to dig into those. You now have a really lovely skillset that will be useful in all areas.

you can also always go back to school for a masters, phd, etc.

Good luck! I pivoted last year from medicine to neuroscience through going to a phd program, and it was a very tough transition, but I am so so much happier now. You are still young, you've got this.

I've worked as software engineer for the past 16 years. My degree was completely orthogonal - physics - although I took some software courses on the side. Never stopped my progress.

Finish your studies, and then find an employer. Do a few online courses if you feel you need to brush up on your skills.

Your degree is most valuable by existing, not being in any specific field.

There are of course position that can be quite strict from qualifications point of view, but don't let that stop you. There are many, many others.

Switching from DS to SWE will not be very hard for you I dont think. Additionally having the DS background can make you extra marketable, especially for smaller companies where a broader skillset is more valuable. If you wanna get some skills with SWE, I would build & deploy some project. Dont worry about the business side but building a rails or nodejs project from scratch and figuring out deployments etc will give you a lot of answers to interview questions.

You might want to gravitate more in the machine learning engineer direction. So much of ML is building the data, training pipelines, the serving environment, model tracking, evaluation, promotion, and other general infra around modeling. Many data scientists are more analyst-plus, and don’t have strong engineering skills. But large scale ML needs more of the latter. As long as you can AB test, you don’t need strong statistical skills to tease apart effects.

Of course, one should consider, there is for sure a bright future for an analyst with math and economics background from Russia in the west.

For the Company or another..

Pursue what you love. If DS isn't your thing , quit it. At least you've given a shot. If you love SWE just seek for SWE!

And I know this is opposite of what most say here but I haven't seen any benefit of my CS degree, and no job ever asked for my university, so I'd say focus on real world not the university, but again this contradicts with many of the opinions. Probably a cultural thing.

Here’s my advice. If you still like working with data then you should look into consulting where you get to work on different projects across different domains. You have to build up your toolkits even within data science. Mastering something like GIS takes awhile and same goes for time-series/finance. And only way to do this is through consulting gigs.

The grass is always greener...

But no reason to be depressed. You should be proud about the effort you put into getting this position. It's never lost. I can't speak about your particular situation in Russia, but as far as switching to SWE, it should be easy. Some people switch careers in their 40s. As a young graduate, it's very easy to change path.

Finish your degree, then pursue computer science. Understanding statistics and data is a super power for a software engineer. There are a lot of data-adjacent software engineering jobs. Telemetry, data pipelines, data visualization applications, maps, apply your cs and ds skills together for an awesome combination.

It's no bigee, don't take it too serious, your still figuring out what you want to do, that's normal. Be pleased you have learnt something, better now than in 10 years! And what you have learnt isn't going to be completely wasted, I'm sure it will help you as a SWE.

Migrate to bigquery, twitter runs on it. No storage cost and you can plugin google datastudio, bigqueryml and automate a lot with cloud-functions. Show them how to do better and graduate on that. They will thank you for it because of the complexity you have removed for all your colleagues.

I feel ya, I was a data engineer at my previous job, and I hated it. In the end, it boils down to the fact that data scientists simply use the tools, while the SWEs build them. Trust your instincts, and follow what you are passionate about, instead of chasing hype/hotness in tech.

With Data Science experience interested in SWE, my first thought is that you could focus on a related specialty area, for example Data Visualisation. Your data science background will mean you have strong foundations to build upon. Datavis expertise in increasingly sought after.

Start leeting and learning algo/DS. Should be no problem to get an entry level job in 3-6 months. In 1-2 years switch jobs and you’ll be doing well. Btw I should add that you’re making the right decision DS is a bad career for reasons I won’t get into here.

There are plenty of SWE jobs adjacent to ML that you'll probably fit right into. I specialized in networking in grad school and was always building web management tools for project. Turned out liking the app development tasks better and went that route.

There are lots of places where a SWE with a solid DS background will be very welcome, even if you've no formal education, if you can show some github repos or other projects you've made, getting a nice enough position is possible.

You discovered you had poor match quality. And the ds experience will help you anyway.

Read the book “range why generalists triumph in a specialized world” if you want to feel good about switching careers once or even multiple times.

See if you can transfer to the data engineering team. They do a lot of coding and you DS background is a big bonus as DS is a client of DE.

I recently completed the transfer from BA to BI and then to a BI that does DE job.

Nothing is written in stone, it's never too late.

In IT knowledge is important, but the ability to gain knowledge is even more important. Just finish your degree. This way you can prove, you can gain knowledge.

Don't drop from your path just yet. Try working for another company in a data scientist role, in a different industry. Something is missing but may be found elsewhere.

> The thing I like the most is actually building stuff with my hands, and I think SWE is a better fit here.

Is this a metaphor? SWE is terrible for building things with your hands.

Just finish the degree and apply to swe jobs. Tailor your resume to mention previous swe experience and as long as you can pass the interviews you’ll be fine.

Finish that degree. With your math background, it won't be any problem to pick up the algorithm stuff you need to pass a whiteboard.

Become a machine learning swe. It's an amazing blend of stats / match and raw engineering. It's a ton of fun

You're already a SWE, just don't apply to data science jobs when you're looking for your next thing.

stay positive! all DS skills will be transferable to normal SWE, the best SWE are all multi-language and strong SQL never goes to waste, lastly - many of the best SWE would be even stronger with some DS competencies, so keep at it and I suspect you'll wind up in a pretty awesome place.

As someone who made a similar transition but in the opposite direction, (from iOS to web frontend to ML), it seems like the best thing is just to start doing more SWE work. It feels like there is neverending demand for entry level SWE in the US, and any background that can pass the interview is welcome. I don't know what the market is like in Europe, but I would not worry about being able to pivot.

The work you did was almost certainly not a waste. The SQL you learned is going to be incredibly valuable to small companies looking for "fullstack" or backend roles too. Definitely puts you above bootcamp grads that only know how to put together a UI. And understanding statistics let's you run proper A/B experiments at large companies, or apply to "data engineer" roles building critical data infrastructure.

All these things are also just valuable even if all they taught you early in your career is that you liked doing something else. Some people get PhD's before realizing they hate the field and then the sunk-cost-fallacy (or student loans) force them to pursue a career in it anyways, it's wonderful to have clarity on what you like so young.

I would probably just finish your degree if you are close, because I think it could make getting visa sponsorship in some countries easier, but I would just read some tutorials for the kind of SWE engineering you want to try on the side, and build a small portfolio project with the tech. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just a to-do app even if you want to do web frontend in a popular framework like React, for example. I think there are probably MOOCs to look into that pick a project and walk you through it even, but I don't think you have to go that route. Just a little effort to demonstrate to employees you understand the tech you chose, and for you, to make sure you actually enjoyed worked with the tech. I am thinking on the order of 1 weeks work. Throw that on your resume and just apply to the kinds of jobs you want. You are almost certainly over-qualified for many.

The good news is that the worst is probably behind you. In my experience (in the US), SWE is way way easier to break into than data science, you just need to finish a small minor project. This wasn't wasted effort, it's a small part of your overall career and it taught you valuable study skills and how to do hard work!

I will also close by saying, I imagine things can be rough in Russia right now. It is possible the depression you are feeling has multiple contributions and will pass when you change your environment, or your environment evolves, and is not all from the work you are doing. These last few years have been rough for a lot of people around the world. I would say you have built up valuable skills that you will almost certainly use again in your career, and not attribute all of the reasons to feel bad to your early career just yet. You have some excellent experience going for you.

Good luck! Let me know if you choose web development and want any advice on that career in particular. I would look into fullstack or data engineer roles personally. My email is my username at hey if you want to chat more.