Before you tear me apart for saying this, just hear me out.
Photo by David Pupăză on Unsplash
I see a lot of YouTube videos and other posts online from people saying “I quit my six digit job in data science etc etc” and from the reading of these posts it is indirectly implied that they were successful. Also, the people that make less money and read their posts look up to these authors and consider them successful.
Yet this population of coders and advanced analysts is NOT the successful one.
I’m saying this while being one of them and having been in such positions for a few years, after working my way up to this salary.
I am very familiar with the corporate structure both from working in Fortune 500 companies and from working outside corporate, thus understanding it from both sides.
Nowadays large corporations pay a starting salary of 100k+ to a new/raw data scientist, data engineer, or software engineer. After a couple of years and a promotion the salary can easily jump to 120k, and after 2–3 more years to 150k and beyond.
To the person that is not familiar with these inner workings, it might look like the junior data scientist was so talented and dedicated to his/her job to get to 150k in their mid to late 20s — a feat that not many other jobs can duplicate.
Yet this is a natural, normal progression in corporations nowadays. The buzz words of “automation”, “machine learning” means that they pay well for people that can (some more than others) do these things.
The first few years the salary of such workers jumps upwards a lot, and some of them also get to manage a small team of similarly skilled people.
Then the salary progression starts to abruptly level off. By the time the now “senior” or “lead” data scientist or software engineer gets to around 200k, there are two things that can happen.
One, which is not very good news for them, is that they are forever pegged into a solely technical role — they become one of the nerds in chief in the…