Hustle Hub #18

Hey friends,

Hope you enjoyed the issue last week.

Recently I’ve been thinking of interviewing data experts (i.e. data scientist, data engineer, ML engineer) for them to share their career journeys and learning experience in our weekly issues. The interviews will be done in Q&A format and packed with actionable advice to transform your career, including:

• How to learn data science

• How to build a data science portfolio

• How to prepare for interviews

• How to land a job

• Mistakes and lessons learned

• … and more career secrets 👀

In today's issue, I’d like to share with you my day-to-day life as a data scientist when I was at Micron, the miscommunication between me and my team members, and the lesson learned from this experience.

Let’s get started! 🚀 

🛖 What's in the hub today?

• Tip: A Day in the Life of a Data Scientist

• Mistake: Miscommunication delayed our project timeline

• Learning: Never assume, always over-communicate

• Book: Founder Brand

• Tool: Notion AI

⭐️ 1 Tip

 A Day in the Life of a Data Scientist

When I conducted coaching calls, one of the questions I got asked a lot is this:

That’s a good question as you might think you’ll enjoy working as a data scientist, but in reality, that might not be the case once you’re in the role itself.

Here’s what a typical day looked like when I was a data scientist at Micron to hopefully give you a better idea of the job role in general and debunk some common myths that you may have.

8:00-9:00 — Starting My Day

I typically started my day with a cup of coffee. The first thing was to review my emails and Teams chats that I might have missed from the day before.

After that, I listed out the top 3 tasks that I wanted to complete for the day. Tasks could be coding, analysing data, bugs fixing, preparing presentation slides and meetings.

From here, I prioritise my tasks accordingly.

9:00-9:30 — Daily Scrum Meeting

At 9am, I had a daily scrum meeting with my team on a machine learning project to deploy the ML solution to our manufacturing line.

Typically, we would cover three questions in the meeting:

• What did you do yesterday?

• What do you plan to do today?

• Do you face any challenges?

As I mainly worked with software engineers and machine learning engineers, I personally found the daily scrum helpful in terms of keeping our team aligned and the project within the timeline.

9:30-10:00 — Preparing for Presentation

After the daily scrum meeting, I started preparing for the presentation with my stakeholders. This involved crafting a story to present a problem statement, a solution to solve the problem, and actionable insights as the next step.

10:00-12:00 — Ad Hoc Analysis

Due to the nature of my work in manufacturing, there were issues to be fixed almost every day, hence the need to do ad hoc analysis to help engineers solve those issues in the manufacturing line.

This could be anything from running SQL queries to share quick insights, doing pivot table in Excel, writing simple Python scripts to run analysis etc.

1:00-5:00 — Coding / Meeting

After lunch, I finally got to sit down and code - yay! 😉

This was my focused time to prioritise the tasks that I set in the morning. No distraction, just code. Besides coding, I sometimes had 1-1 meeting with my manager to update my progress, challenges faced and potential help needed.

You’d be surprised that I spent most of my time on data cleaning and analysis, not building ML models. While building ML models is cool and fun, that’s not what I did for 90% of my time.

So if you think being a data scientist is all about building ML models, you might need to think twice. 😂

And that, my friend, is my typical day as a data scientist.

👉🏻 Do you still want to become a data scientist? Reply to this email and let me know!

⚠️ 1 Mistake

For certain projects at Micron, I worked with a team from different departments and countries, miscommunication happened frequently at the start, causing a significant delay to our project timeline.

The root cause of the miscommunication?

We assumed.

• We assumed that this person did A and that person did B.

• We assumed that this person already knew C.

We never asked for clarification. But instead, we assumed. This mistake was painful as we got to rework so many things simply because of miscommunication.

🧠 1 Learning

Because of the delayed project timeline, our senior manager in charge was concerned with our team dynamic and communication overhead.

So one day, he called all of us into a meeting, listen to us and tried to understand the situation, and share this lesson with us:

From that day onward, we changed the way we collaborated as a team. We always asked for clarification. If we were unsure of something, ASK. It’s better to ask dumb questions than do dumb things for 3 months with no results.

🧠 Here’s what I’ve learned:

• Never assume, always over-communicate.

• I was lucky to have a good boss when I was at Micron. When you’re early in your career, having a good boss is what matters the most as your boss will make or break your career.

• His simple advice has forever changed the way I collaborate with others ever since when it comes to project and team management.

📚️ 1 Book

Founder Brand: Turn Your Story Into Your Competitive Advantage

If you’re thinking of building a startup as a founder, this book is a must-read for you — written by Dave Gerhardt.

As a founder building an early-stage startup, nobody knows about your startup. But if you’ve built a founder brand around your startup, people will trust you and buy from you — simple as that.

And that’s exactly why I’m constantly building my founder brand on LinkedIn. Play the long game, add value to the community, build trust, help each other, and document my startup journey along the way.

📚️ Here are my takeaways from the book:

• Become a storyteller. As a founder, you have a story, and it’s one of your most valuable assets.

• Start with a niche, build an audience in that niche, learn and expand.

• Create a "villain" in your product/service

  • A villain serves a clear purpose in your founder brand.

  • Show your work and results in public on how you solve the problem.

• Build in public

  • Document your startup journey on social media.

  • Share your mistakes and lessons learned.

👉🏻 Have you read this book? What's your thought on it?

🧰 1 Tool

If you’ve ever used Notion before, you know how powerful Notion is when it comes to organising your life and work and collaborating with others — all in one place.

Personally, I’m a big fan of Notion and I’ve been using it as my Second Brain to organise my life and work. Besides, Notion has also helped me streamline my content creation workflow for maximum productivity.

Finally, Notion AI is now available to everyone. Watch their short demo video to see how Notion AI works and be prepared to be blown away. 🤯 

Here are some features of Notion AI:

• Action Items — Analyze meeting notes to generate next steps, instantly.

• Summaries — Write a summary in 30 seconds, not 30 minutes.

• Takeaways — Surface what’s important from research, sales calls & more.

Say goodbye to writer’s block.

Say hello to AI — write better and communicate with confidence.

👉🏻 By the way, are you already using Notion? What’s your thought on it?

🚀 Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:

1. Book a coaching call with me if you need help in the following:

2. Promote your brand to ~1000 subscribers in the data/tech space by sponsoring this newsletter.

3. Watch my YouTube videos where I talk about data science tips, programming, and my tech life (P.S. Don’t forget to like and subscribe 💜).

4. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter for more data science career insights, my mistakes and lessons learned from building a startup.

That's all for today

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope it has helped you in some ways and brought you some peace of mind.

You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.

See you again next week.

- Admond