Hi there. I'm not sure if this is the right place for this question, but I can't think of anywhere else where people might know the answer.
Right out of my math masters, I got a job at a start-up where my title was data scientist and my work was building a estimate for the revenue of various apps based on their performance in the app store and a few other metrics. There was nobody else at the company who did what I did and no real oversight, so I was very self-led. I did the Andrew Ng course on Coursera, picked up a bunch of O'Reilly books like "Python for Data Analysis," "Doing Data Science," and "Data Analysis with Open Source Tools."
Eventually I decided I wanted to move to a company where I could learn from other people. I ended up taking a job at a cool company under a guy with a really impressive resume. My new title is data analyst, because he says my experience doesn't qualify me for the data scientist title or role. But the new job paid more and I thought I could learn a lot. After a bit of time there, though, I have some misgivings:
- I haven't been asked to use a single ML algorithm; the most mathematically interesting thing I've done is a log-log regression.
- Even simple approaches I've tried, he's asked me to dumb down - one example, we were examining a collection of metrics to see which one had that largest effect on another metric, and I did a simple multivariate linear regression on a bunch of our historical data just to get an idea of what I was looking at. He said this was unecessary and to just treat each metric as if it was independent from the others.
- Almost all analysis that isn't done in the sql query is done in excel, and any visualization we put in our presentations has to be an excel graph "so we can go back and tweak it easily."
- We spend as much time building powerpoint presentations as we do combing through data
- We don't use any of the software that I understand most companies are looking for in new hires - Hadoop, Hive, etc.
So, my question is, is this job really helping me grow my career in data, or am I stuck in a dead end?
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