I used to live in a beautiful world. A world called denial. When anyone would ask me the question “what do you do?”, my first thought would be, uh, not “software engineering!" After all, I identify as a “Data Scientist” even after doing “IT” from a B. Tech institute. That fueled my fake sense of superiority over a desi software engineer. Young engineers around me did not pay enough attention to rebut me and laypersons only cared about the “AI” in my job description. Thus, I got away with claiming to be in the sexiest job of 21st century. Everyone else got away with calling me coder, data analyst, software developer or worse: IT guy.
Excuse me, I’m not IT guy, despite working in little subsets at the intersections of Data and Images and Programming and Design and Statistics and OS and you-get-my-point?
Ok see, there was a time in my philosophical-journey when I identified as an ontological engineer too! Subsequently, I developed a feeling of futility for meta-physics. And this theme taints over every knowledge I associate myself with. Then came the data science for good and for worse. The good part being that I started appreciating the holistic patterns of human civilization’s data at large. They were in front of my eyes, in graphs and scattered plots, showing how similar and human we all are… until we aren’t. The bad arrives: All of our data is not about us. Most of it is just meta, arbitrary metrics or sensor data. And the small part that is about us, is only a part of “us” and our interactions the “digital footprint”. In Data Science, we represent all of them numerically and model it in hopes that we can control/predict a part of it and make money out of it OR divide and instigate people on social media. The worse is that it’s incomplete and it’s messy and at times, it is outright wrong. Despite that it continues to affect our lives on a daily basis and we get by, by ignorance. So, you see how that feeling of futility arrives in these times?
Knowledge is power. And with great power comes… work. In the past three years I’ve worked around data. One, by accumulating knowledge from standing on the shoulders of all people smarter than me and people who write stack-overflow answers. And then secondly (after some experience), by assembling answers and knowledge from smarter people and to solve the problems that I faced in my projects. Recently, I sat down to reflect over my technological-journey in the past three years, I realized, that I’m all over the place. See:
I don’t care if you understand this map or not, I spent good three hours of a weekend’s afternoon to make this. It ought to be in front of someone. Thanks.
So, if you don’t see the bad in this yet, let me point them out: my knowledge and work base is spread over four different roles, Media, Machine Learning, Data Engineering, and Front-End. All this while discounting the networking part because it’s a given in this “internet-age”. Thus, here I am posing a question, that I presumably left to fate and life and future recruiters: Am I a bad developer for being a jack of all stacks and master of none? The short answer is, perhaps, I need to become a product manager now.