Career Advice appreciated
Hey,
I know IH is all about having his/her own project and hack, obviously. Nevertheless, a not so tiny amount of us still needs to have a day job just for the sake of payment of rent and other duties ;)
However, I'm one of those with a day job and I would appreciate any career advice on my situation. I just started as Junior Developer (note, I'm 40 now and entered the developer world 1 year ago) in a small data science team. Our team consists of 4 members only, incl myself, but part of a corporate firm in the pharma industry (~ 40.000 employees). My main job is writing SQL queries, using Databricks, Power BI, Osi-Pi and Discoverant.
I'm actually educated as web developer, so I'm familiar with the typical webstack (HTML5, CSS3, PHP, Javascript, MySQL); but do not have that big experience yet. Since I'm not having any web dev related stuff in my day job I'm a bit worried if I might head in the right direction. So far, I like the job and the team and can learn a lot in SQL.
My goal is to work remotely within the next 3 - 5 years, preferred in Brazil (I do have family bonding there).
My question or where my doubts are: Should I concentrate solely on SQL or should I dive into data science (incl. python, statistics, analytics,.....)? I know that having a solid SQL knowledge will help a lot in the future. I'm not so sure about the data science part. Data science is the future I guess, or is this hype gone already? I have no problem taking courses or mini-bachelors on sites like edx or coursera. But I won't do a full degree again. I am looking for a field where I can combine WEb Development, SQL Proficiency and Remote in a high paying sector in 3 years. If possible, would like to work as a freelancer or just project based.
I would be interested in having a mentor or career coach specialized in software development / engineering.
Thanks for any advice / help / hint you have! Much appreciated!
Why not start offering your services part time right now instead of waiting for 3 years?
This way you can guage interest in your experience based upon the type of clients that are hiring you and then plan your next move.
Thank you @prateekrmathur for taking time and commenting my question. I'm working part time on 1 of my 2 IH projects. There's no time left of the day, considering doing 1-2 hours of sports, commuting, and working on the IH side projects.
I haven't listed the project here on IH but I started it back 2017, selling 2 books on Amazon which already brings very little, but still constant flow of monthly money (talking of a 2 digit amount, so very very low but....well coming in).
At the moment I working on the relaunch of the site and will then move on to adding more content to the site. I don't want to spend money on outbound marketing - aka google ads etc.... at least not now, might consider facebook ads though as there are some groups that seem to fit to my targeted audience. But so far inbound marketing worked not too bad. It's just 4 blog articles, each ~1000 words but they do bring some traffic. Everything very low but since there are people buying my 2 books I decided to spend more time on it.
So, 4 months have passed now and I'm actually quite satisfied in my new job.
Awesome! Good luck.