The Last Episode of Becoming a Data Scientist: I Got an Offer! Job Application Stats in 2024

I just got a call from the recruiter and she gave me an offer. I hung up the call, I tried to call my partner, didn't pick up. I have to tell somebody. So, oh yeah, I want to tell you guys. This is so exciting. I'm like shaking and I can't stand in place. But this is such wonderful news on a Friday and the offer is so good. I told the recruiter that I'm going to think about it. I'm going to look at the offer and think about it because I am expecting two other offers. But honestly, the offer is so good. I might as well just call back later today and be like, you know what, forget about the two other offers. I'm in. Let's get this started. But the offer is so good in a sense that, you know how job postings put a salary range? I think that me and the team during the interview process, it went so well that they just straight put me at the top of the line for the range of the salary. It's a huge step up from my current job because one, the main reason is that my current job is Pennsylvania pay level, which takes into cost of living into consideration. And cost of living in Pennsylvania is a lot lower than it is here in the Bay Area. So that's already a big bump. And on top of that, I think the fact that the team and I had a good rapport really helped with me coming into top of the line for this job. I'm so excited and I just needed to share it with someone. Okay, I'm going to go read the offer letter now. Bye! One pair of pants later. Hello, my internet friend. It's been a long time since I've seen you, since you've seen me. A lot has happened. Roll it back a little bit. The last time we talked was when I accepted the offer. I didn't take long to accept the offer. I think it was like 11-ish AM that I was given the offer. I accepted it by like two o'clock. I was like, this, I love the team. I love the job. The company seemed exciting. I was like, you know what? Forget about the two other offers. I was waiting. This is what I'm going with. It didn't take me long. After I accepted the offer, I put in my two weeks notice at my last job. Then I had seven days or 10 days between the end of my first job and the start of my second job. I went to a wedding in Ohio. I traveled for like six days to Guatemala. It was wonderful. Oh, by the way, happy new year to everyone. I am filming this. Yesterday was Christmas day. It's been a month since I've started my new job. I don't think I could have asked for anything better. Maybe one thing I could have asked for better. One thing is I live in like South Bay, if you know the Bay area, like we're in the South and San Francisco is somewhere up here. My commute is about two hours if I take public transit. That could be better, but everything else has been everything that I hoped and dreamed for. The projects that have been assigned. The good thing is I only have to go into the office like once a week, which isn't too bad at all. I've worked from home ever since the work from home COVID thing started and I've never returned to the office. And now that I go back to the office, the company has such a good culture and the office feels so lively that I'm going to move sometime next year so that I can be closer to the office and commute and go in more often. Can you tell that I really like this job? I really like this job. As far as the content of the job goes, it's really exciting. Like I said, I'm on like two or three different projects and I mentioned in my first data science video that one of the reason why I want to go into data science and not be a data analyst anymore was that there were a lot of back proving, if you will. I don't even know if that's a word. In a sense that like a VP would be like, here is a hypothesis that I have. Now go prove it, prove I'm right using data. And then I would somehow pull the data, crunch the data to make sure that on a slide, the data shows the point that the VP is trying to prove, which is not how I want to work with data and this new job and the new projects I'm on is none of that. I don't want to talk too much of the projects that I'm working on because I don't know what the implications are there. And in short, the project is why do some sales close quicker than others, which is a very open-ended question, which is exactly what I love and I want to do because there are so many ways you can approach this. And it's not like I'm giving you a result, now prove it. It's like you figure it out based on the data that you see. It's only a month in and I don't know a whole lot. I've been asking a lot of questions shamelessly. Let me share some of my final stats for my job searching process. I'm looking at my little spreadsheet here. I've been logging pretty much every job I've applied to, what status it is. All right, and here are the final stats. I put in my first job application on July 29th, so end of July, and I accepted my job offer on October 18th. So that's a good three months of aggressively applying to jobs. Now that I'm like looking at this stat, I'm kind of shocked. It definitely felt like it was more than three months but it's only three months. In this three months period, I've applied to a total of 103 jobs. I didn't hear back from 50 of them, that's almost half. It's not like I got rejected, it's not like I just never heard back from them after I applied. And I got rejected for the 47 other jobs, that's also almost half. On the day that I accepted my offer, I was in the pipeline for a total of six jobs. But for three of them, it was too early in the process that it really could have gone either way. Like I could have been a candidate or I could have been rejected. Two jobs, I was expecting an offer for either the next week or the week after. Obviously, I accepted one job offer. So 103 jobs in three months, that's like 31 jobs that I apply to every month. It felt like it was a lot more than it is. I felt like I was doing a lot more than 31 like on average one day. And of the 103 jobs, I also tracked whether they were a combination of supply chain and data science or just purely data science. Early on in the application process, I was purely only applying to data science job, particularly product data scientist jobs. And I had 87 jobs that I applied to were just data science. Then I realized as I went on in the process that I wasn't getting a lot of feedback or callbacks on the pure data scientist jobs. I started to apply to a combination of supply chain and data science to leverage my past experience working as a data analyst in supply chain. Applied to 16 jobs that were a combination of both. And of the six jobs in the end that I was in the pipeline for, the three that I was early on in the pipeline for, two were a combination of supply chain and data science. One was just data science. The two offers I was expecting were both a combination of supply chain and data science. And the offer that I accepted in the end is just pure data science. It has nothing to do with supply chain. That's my final stats. 103 job applications later, I'm here. But yeah, I just wanted to update you guys that I am now officially a data scientist. I've been a data scientist for a month. I'm so happy to share this with you. If you're still in the journey, just know that there is an end to things. And one day you're going to get there and you're going to be so happy. It's going to be so worth it. With that, I'm going to see you here again soon. Bye.