Ask HN: Is being employed like renting out your brain for eight hours a day?

I'm a mid level data scientist at a company where projects move extremely slowly. A lot of my time is spent waiting for decisions or approvals, and the technical work itself is not very challenging. I feel like my skills are stagnating and I'm not building the portfolio or experience I'd like.

The job market for data science roles is pretty bad right now (at least where I am, in Germany), so changing jobs feels risky.

For those who have been in a similar situation:

    How did you keep learning and progressing professionally when your day job wasn't pushing you?

    Are there specific projects, open source contributions, or side skills you'd recommend focusing on?

I'm trying to balance staying employed with keeping my career momentum going. Would appreciate concrete ideas, especially from others who have navigated similar slow periods.

Comments (3)

al_borland · 2h ago

In invested time to develop more soft skills around the other side of the job. If poor decisions were being made, or taking too long, I’d use my skills to gather data, then worked to get better at presenting that data in ways that would matter to the people who needed to make these decision, so the choice became more obvious.

I’m not a data scientist by trade, but ended up spending a lot of time with data to help drive decision to move the ball forward in the areas I felt needed to move forward.

But of course, any sufficiently large company is going to have some level of bureaucracy that slows things down. It’s the nature of the beast.

I found side projects helped for this. I’ve had one long-running side project at work for over 10 years now. Whenever things are moving slow and I’m waiting, or I just need to tinker and learn something new, that’s where I go. It’s useful for the company, it has a few hundred internal users, most probably don’t even know who I am, but it mostly exists as a place for me to tinker.

kamilap · 3h ago

Charity work is the way imho. You can support an NGO with your skills, contribute to an open source projects or challenge yourself with a side project that will be interesting for you and good for others. In my experience, it makes it a lot more motivating. There are orgs connecting tech people and NGOs, you might want to look into that, e.g. tech to the rescue: https://app.techtotherescue.org/available-projects?

paulcole · 2h ago

> How did you keep learning and progressing professionally when your day job wasn't pushing you?

In my experience the people who keep learning and progressing professionally when their day job isn't pushing them are intrinsically motivated and simply do this on their own. They find things to learn and they find ways to progress professionally. They identify skills they lack and get them. They have ideas and follow them through.

I think you have to figure out whether you are one of those people right now or not. It's fine to not be (you can always change in the future) but at least you can stop worrying about it.