Erin Grand

Plus I like to spend a lot of my time outside of work doing non-data things to avoid burnout. My free time outlet is playing bass.

I wonder if you would consider it unfair to others if you were offered a job playong bass.

(From another astro-bassist) Considering I play bass for charity and the occasional free beer it might be unfair to pro bass players, but if only I were also actually any good.

In which case it would only be unfair to be hired because of doing data science as a hobby if that person is good at it. But if she is good at it, it would not actually be unfair, right?

@kierisi recently had a thread about this

Yes! Lots of great suggestions for getting around hiring bias

Could you share it again?

You are totally right, but that’s actually the only way I found to get into Data Science. I don’t have kids and I actually quit my job to train myself, I wonder if there is a different way.

For real. No one promised it would be easy. For myself, I don’t see any other way but the hard way: balance work, family, school and all the git/blog/learning/meetups; work hard and perform at the top of your abilities. LMK if y’all find an easy way / a shortcut to success.

1/ It's just fine to not have lots of git repos, talk in meetups or simply occupying the time outside work in family and different stuff. A lot of people that are prominent open "sorceresses" have privileged conditions in their life. But,...

2/ that doesn't mean it's impossible to give back to the community. The first and more important place to contribute to open source should be your daily job. We all use tools created by others, our employers benefit from that "free" work and should create spaces that allows...

3/ us to close the circle and contribute back. Be it a bug fix PR, a tutorial on how we solved a problem, even hosting a meetup. Tons of things can be done in "9 to 5" regular jobs if we move the company culture toward that goal. It's a win-win situation and if your employer...

4/ does not get that fact, probably it's not the best place to work and you should be elsewhere. I don't want to sound as an open source hippie but it's real that many times we use excuses for not being part of instead of actually trying to do something.

1/ Super fair point! Thinks its a huge challenge. Recently I became a father. Some thoughts on this: Doing it for resume purposes only is not the right motivation. Doing it because you love doing it should come first. Makes it a hobby rather than work.

2/ You don't want to measure yourself against people who can devote to R full time. You can do pull requests to packages by others, write occasional blogs or maintain a modest package. You don't have constant obligations in open source this way.

3/ View contributing to open source as a part of your job. Convince your manager that when you are relying on open source giving back is not only nice, but necessary. You can do your job so much more effective because of open source, time save should be given back.