CS has two career tracks: research scientist and infrastructure engineer. The middle is hollow. If you're not going to be the former — and statistically, you're not — then the game is school name + stacked internships, not GPA.
Everyone says "data-driven." But most data work never touches the documents where real decisions get recorded. Here's why I started reading 10-Ks for fun — and what it taught me about the gap between dashboards and boardrooms.
I went to Airbus expecting to build models. Instead I spent most of my time cleaning SQL queries, arguing about chart colours, and learning that the hardest part of data work has nothing to do with data.
Practical things I learned processing 10TB+ of aviation data — partition strategies, avoiding collect(), and why your notebook that works at 1GB will betray you at 100GB.
I spent two years optimising models and one year optimising slide decks. The slide decks changed more outcomes. A reflection on why I'm pointing my career at the data-decisions boundary — and why finance is where that gap is widest.