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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2640 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 8, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

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  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

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I'm an early career Data Scientist in e-commerce and logistics so I might not have the best advice, but maybe the most recent advice.

  1. You know pythons ML stack and sql already that's starting off on a good foot. I don't think you'd benefit much learning more technologies. Most BI tools are the same if you know how to query using sql and for the really dirty stuff you can just pull out pandas and create a report in a python notebook.
  2. Learn the domain well. Can't really help you much there. But this is non-negotiable. You will be struggling a whole lot if you get some numbers and you second guess yourself if these numbers pass the smell test or not.
  3. Don't skimp on statistics or more generally just math like a lot of developers do. As an analyst, you probably won't need to be a Statistics God, but once again knowing your stats 101 really well will save you from a lot of second guessing and awkward moments. Here's an anecdote when it saved me a lot of trouble. We track the 90th percentile timings for a lot of things. One of the higher ups was confused at to why 90th percentile of A + 90th percentile of B wasn't equal to 90th percentile of A+B. Well because it's not a linear function and that property doesn't apply. I was asked to investigate why "things weren't adding up". Knowing some basic math saved me a lot of time/headaches, and continue to do so.
  4. Know how to answer basic questions. "What was our revenue during Q3 for location X only during the every alternate weekends" should take you like 3 minutes to answer. Boy oh boy is there a lot of confusion because simple things like this that can be looked up don't get looked up. Don't take anyone's word for anything. Just look these things up.
  5. Know how to answer the hard questions. Lack of information is... information. There's a reason we can drop the nth column when one-hot-encoding without any information loss. Because the counterfactual is information! Basically don't think like an SQL monkey and limit yourself to things that only the BI tool can answer with its GUI. There are lot of opportunities for questions like this in logistics. There exists no columns in a database that allows one to catch warehouse workers slacking off, items going missing or items not being checked in, etc, but a lack of certain rows tells me where to look. So keep an open mind towards the data it probably has some secrets there in plain sight. I'm sure there are lots of things like this in Revenue Management as well.

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