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Comment by carabiner | Hacker News Reader

I'm really considering this. I'm thinking of quitting my job as a data scientist, and working part time delivering propane in my truck while I leetcode hardcore to get into a SWE position. I'm so depressed right now that I'm not sure I have the motivation to sustain that. I barely have enough mental energy for my current job, much less changing careers which will be more intense.

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Keep in mind that from inside the cave, it's always blinding outside. But the moment you step out, your eyes will adapt and it won't be as bad. Cheers mate

Thank you.

Why do you want to move from DS to SWE? I've been thinking of moving from SWE to DS because I don't enjoy the unpaid 24/7 on call support, constant fear of something breaking, having to deal with PM's on my case for the next jira ticket. Also making crud apps is more often then not less mentally challenging then DS.

More money. Much more money. I could afford a house, not just an apartment with a downstairs neighbor who screams at me for making too much noise. I could have a yard and garage. Don't have to work with marketing folks as much or spend so much time explaining technical concepts. Get to just write code and not deal with so much disappointment in models not working. I'd rather crank out CRUD than spend weeks on something without being able to get it to work. But being on call without extra pay really sucks as does Agile. Granted, our DS team is moving to Agile as well. I want a less mentally challenging job, though oddly DS interviews are far less mentally taxing than the Leetcode gauntlet. Grass always seems greener I guess.

Where I live DS pays much more for the same experience the SWE so maybe I am a bit biased on the money side too. But I get you on the models not working thing, I've been there before. Thankfully it was personal projects and not for work. Cranking out CRUD apps does give you some sort of satisfaction I guess although I sorely miss doing math because my background is in engineering. If you have to do algo tests I guess you're in the USA? I've interviewed with companies in EU and Africa and everytime it was just a take home test building something according to spec using specified languages and frameworks. It's not that hard to do. I'm actually doing one right now for a senior dev golang job although I never wrote more than 1k lines of code in golang before lol

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