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Ask HN: What to do if you're not good at your new job?

1 points by tonym9428 ↗ HN
I'm a statistician with ten years of experience and I recently accepted a data scientist job in SV. Long story short, I'm not a good developer and the past four months have not been too kind. Thus, I'm realizing that while I'm a solid statistician, programming is not my strong suit, and really isn't something I enjoy. What would you do in such situations?

3 comments

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nathan_long
If you want to improve as a developer, I'm sure people here can offer advice. (In that case, you should probably elaborate on what you think your shortcomings are in programming.) But it sounds like you've decided you don't want to.

I think your options are either 1) find a new job and leave, or 2) see if it's possible for you to be useful at your current job without writing your own code. If you trust your management, you could ask them which makes more sense there. If not, you should probably leave anyway.

tonym9428
I like the employer and a lot of the work that I do. However, I'm just not good with the logic behind automating statistical analysis in a production environment. I'm used to statistics first and programming second, and this current role is programming first and statistics second.

I want to become a better developer, but I'm still going to be a stats guy in the future

usernamebias
I know nothing about you or your struggles, so I'll answer this from a point of experience -- a personal story. I'm currently working as a Full-stack dev and system architect for a certain SV startup, I've crawled my way here. When I was starting that journey I worked as social media coordinator, which in short is a person who manages a brand's social media presence/reputation. I hated every minute of it. I didn't quit because I had bills to pay. That went on for 8 months before I had the expendable income to make the transition.

Point of the story is -- Find what you love doing, don't be tied down to something you do not enjoy, however do so tactfully. The saying says "Best time to find a job is when you have one"