Hustle Hub #26

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Hey friends,

How are you doing? I was recently invited to visit the LinkedIn office and met Alita — the Creator Manager SEA at LinkedIn.

My main takeaway from the visit and conversation is that LinkedIn is focusing to empower creators on the platform (Insider news: LinkedIn will launch programmes soon to help creators write better content and build community).

By the way, LinkedIn has recently launched a new initiative called Get Hired by LinkedIn News Asia. Think of it like a place to level up your career by learning from the community. Don’t forget to follow the page!

In today's issue, I’d like to share with you 3 tips to hack your job search, why motion is not progress, a must-have book to learn data analysis, and AutoGPT!

Let’s get to it! 🚀 

🛖 What's in the hub today?

• Tip: How to hack your job search (without getting burned out)

• Mistake: My first business failed terribly

• Learning: Motion ≠ Progress

• Book: Python for Data Analysis

• Tool: AutoGPT

⭐️ 1 Tip

How to hack your job search (without getting burned out)

The common way of job search is to fill up an application form, submit your resume on a job portal, and hope for the best.

However, because everyone is doing the same thing, it’s difficult for you to stand out among other candidates. 😣 As a result, very often you don’t hear back from recruiters or get rejected — even before the first round of interviews.

So what’s the solution?

Over the past few years in my career, I’ve personally found these 3 tips very useful to hack my job search. And I actually landed a DS role by following this approach.

Tip #1: Ask for referral

A referral is how I got my DS role at Micron. Since a friend of mine worked at Micron back then, I asked for his referral. One week after, I got my first interview, and the rest is history.

If you submit your resume on a job portal, you essentially join the long queue — competing with other candidates.

If you ask for a referral and submit your resume to the right person, you join the privileged queue with almost 0% competition.

In short, referral is king in job search. 👑

Tip #2: Join tech meetups & competitions

When I first started, I joined many tech meetups and competitions for 2 reasons:

• I wanted to learn from the community and experience

• I wanted to explore potential job opportunities

This is because when a company organises a tech meetup or competition, there is always a purpose behind it. It’s either the company has something to share with the community or wants to attract tech talents to join the company.

For example, say you joined a meetup before. One month after, if a company has a job opening for a DS role, the company might reach out to you for an interview. Congratulations! You just cut the queue again. 👀

Tip #3: Reach out to decision makers on LinkedIn

For example, after I joined a meetup (or applied for a job), I’d usually reach out to the decision maker on LinkedIn for potential job/business opportunities in the future.

This step could significantly increase your visibility to the decision maker for 2 reasons:

• You show to the decision maker that you’re proactive to learn more about the role compared to other candidates who just spray and pray.

• You build rapport with the decision maker so when the company is hiring someone, very likely you’d be top of the list because the decision maker thought of you.

🎁 BONUS: Networking on Lunchclub

I’ve met many interesting people (founders, managerial executives, engineers etc.) on Lunchclub, and some of them are actually hiring data roles for their companies.

This makes me wonder why job seekers are not leveraging Lunchclub. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Besides job search, you’ll also meet interesting people and learn from each other. Win-Win. If you’re not on Lunchclub yet, please do yourself a favour and join HERE. 🔥 

⚠️ 1 Mistake

My first business failed terribly.

When I started my first consulting business, instead of finding customers, I spent the first few months:

• Registering a new company

• Designing and printing name cards

• Finding a freelancer to build a beautiful website

• Building social presence for the company (LinkedIn page)

While it seems that I was doing many things, none of them made any difference in my business if I had zero customers.

I was doing lots of motion without progressing.

It was fake productivity — big mistake. 🤦🏻‍♂️

🧠 1 Learning

After all the months of “working hard”, I still didn’t get a single customer.

I realised I confused motion with progress. I thought when I was swimming toward a direction when I was just splashing water and staying stagnant in the same place.

🧠 Here’s what I’ve learned:

• When building a business (especially service-based), focus on what’s truly important — find customers and make the first $1.

  • Focus on what moves the needle.

• Don’t be distracted by fake progression with motion.

• If you don’t have sales, you don’t have a business. Period.

📚️ 1 Book

Python for Data Analysis: Data Wrangling with pandas, NumPy, and Jupyter

One of the main challenges I faced when I first started in data science is that I didn’t know how to fully utilise Pandas for data cleaning and EDA to generate insights from data.

Very often I used for-loop to automate things when I could have used a vectorised approach like .apply() method. Frankly speaking, I learned most of my EDA skills from this book. Highly recommended. 🌟

If you want to support the author, you can buy the book from Amazon. Alternatively, you can read it for FREE on the author’s website.

📚️ Here are my takeaways from the book:

• How to use the common methods in Pandas for data cleaning and EDA

• How to use Pandas .groupby() method to transform and summarise data

• How to use Matplotlib for data visualisation more effectively

• Practical examples to solve real-world data analysis problems

If you’re thinking to improve your skills in data cleaning, EDA or data visualisation — this book is for you.

🧰 1 Tool

By now, you might have already heard of (or used) AutoGPT. To give you a quick summary, below are some reasons why people are so excited about this AI tool:

• AutoGPT can autonomously improve its prompts and achieve whatever goal you set.

• It can access the internet to search for the latest information (unlike ChatGPT in which their training data has a cutoff date).

• It can create applications, produce podcast episodes, and operate the do-anything-machine.

It’s quite crazy. Check out its repo if you want to try it out.

🔥 Hustler Spotlight 🔥

👋🏻 How would you introduce yourself?

‍Hi! I’m Kristen Kehrer, I’ve been in data since 2010. I spent some time in the utilities doing econometric time series analysis, and some time in healthcare doing things like analysis around motivating people to get their colorectal cancer screenings, but most of my time was in e-commerce. In 2018 I started a blog “Data Moves Me” and through that built up a following and opportunities and went off on my own! This was very exciting, I did a mix of freelancing, consulting, and teaching. Now I’m in a role called “developer advocacy” and absolutely loving it.

👀 What’s your day to day like in your current role as a Developer Advocate at Comet?

‍I love it! I’m basically able to marry content creation with data work and spend a ton of time talking to the community. My days consist of things like:

• I work on cool projects and use them to create conference talks, blog articles, social media posts, and videos featuring new Comet feature releases.

  • I built a computer vision model to detect the school bus passing my house and send an alert, I’m playing with detecting my dog on different edge devices, and I’m excited to play with pose estimation next

• I host “The Cool Data Projects Show” where I interview practitioners in ML/DL/AI about interesting projects their working on with a focus on methodology and approach.

• I use social listening to understand where people are talking about experiment tracking online (often Reddit or Slack) and I try to be helpful and take part in that conversation.

• I collaborate on projects (courses and content) with other companies and make friends

• I speak on lots of podcasts and use social media to share the good word about tracking experiments and model management with Comet

⭐️ What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

‍There are so many! My career has also taken many turns. Being a LinkedIn Top Voice in Data Science and Analytics was pretty wild given how many people there are that talk about data on the platform. I also think learning that I could work for myself and replace my corporate salary was something that I’m very proud of.

🚀 What's a data or AI trend you're watching this year?

‍ChatGPT is so huge right now that it’s hard to talk about anything else. But I also think that the trend of tech layoffs at the moment is also something to watch. Seeing Meta flattening their workforce and reducing bonuses may become a trend in tech that I will absolutely be keeping a close eye on. It’s a very interesting time of incredible advancement in AI while simultaneously being an uncertain time in terms of employment.

💼 What advice would you give someone starting out in Data Science?

I could go on about this topic forever. It’s often difficult to give blanket advice because depending on whether you’re coming from a CS background, or Stats, or something else I’d have a very different answer in terms of strategy. The one piece of advice I can give that applies to everyone is to become part of a data community online. For myself, I spend the most time on LinkedIn, but there are plenty of other data communities on Reddit, Slack, etc. The community is important for a number of reasons. Obviously, you’ll meet people and those relationships could lead to jobs in the future. However, I think the ability to passively learn through having data-related content in your feed on a regular basis is so important. This is a fast-paced field and techniques become popular and then we realize there’s a better option, or a library comes out that’ll make our lives easier. It’s a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry and impress future hiring managers by being aware of the latest and greatest.

🤯 What’s the most important career lesson you wish you’d learned earlier?

That you don’t have to become a manager to progress your career! There is plenty of opportunity for growth as an IC!

🧠 How would you learn Data Science if you had to start over?

If I had to start over I’d probably get a degree in CS for my bachelors degree. My BS is in math and my MS is in statistics. Although I loved my studies, being a competent developer just gives you so much freedom to build anything and can make technical projects less scary (plus it’s what the hiring managers are looking for in many cases). I obviously code and coded in university for a stats degree, but I think life would have been easier if I had learned it in school vs. being more self-taught.

🔥 Where can we find your amazing work?

You can find me here:

• https://datamovesme.com/

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristen-kehrer-datamovesme/

• https://github.com/KristenKehrer

📚 What's your favorite book?

There are a lot of books I love, but I like to recommend “Weapons of Math Destruction” by Cathy O’Neil. It’s such an important message about how models can perpetuate bias and the problems that can cause.

🚀 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 1,000+ 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