Moving from development to business analytics

meor

Hi,

I'm considering accepting a position on a business analytics masters. After three years in development, I'm losing the passion for it and know that I'll be left behind when the time comes to adapt new technologies etc as I'm just not that interested anymore.

Has anyone else made the switch? How is it? If not, does anyone have any thoughts in general? How would salary compare?

Thanks!

fergalr

meor wrote: »

Hi,

I'm considering accepting a position on a business analytics masters. After three years in development, I'm losing the passion for it and know that I'll be left behind when the time comes to adapt new technologies etc as I'm just not that interested anymore.

Has anyone else made the switch? How is it? If not, does anyone have any thoughts in general? How would salary compare?

Thanks!

I did something a bit like this, more towards machine learning / big data / analytics / statistics (and recently towards product management) from CS/Software. But I'm still very much in the two (or three?) worlds.

Your questions aren't super specified but:

- I would say that the useful lifetime of knowledge in analytics/stats/ML is longer than that in pure development. The t-test you learn will be around longer than the web framework du jour. (I made another post on this recently). That might be a good thing.
- Its a different sort of work and skillset. It takes years to learn properly how to think about data/stats. Stats is huge and hard.
- There's a lot of different roles.
A) There is 'run SQL queries for business reasons' (sort of a business analyst), make reports, have some idea of what to look at, and better be able to make a mean powerpoint with your conclusions.
There is 'connect all our infrastructure so that all the ETL is good and we can run these queries we need to' (maybe a lot of joining data, a lot of ETL - if you are good at software, it will be hard to escape the gravity of these areas - but its a great compliamentary skillset)
C) There is 'be really good at ML and software and big build complex systems' - these jobs are harder to get in Ireland I'd say, but I think will come up more and more.

I'd say C pays well, but this is specialized stuff.

I'd say A often pays less well than software dev - unless you get really good at the business end of things, in which case its hard to say.

Software development has such gravity/attraction, because its in such high demand, you need to have a good rational for why you are going away from it, and what the plan is, if you don't want to end up just doing it again afterwards.

But its really hard to say, data is a growing area. Caution: A lot of people don't actually have big data, or hard problems, and just need SQL turned into business reports in a way that might be very interesting for the business, but not interesting in and of itself.

I think this stuff is fascinating; I love the intersection of ML/AI/Software.

meor

Thanks for the detailed reply. I think I'll probably leave it for now and stick with development for a while longer. Would really be a rushed decision jumping into this for two years.

Cheers