Almost a year back, I was asked to work out of the client location – Applied Materials.
The initial conversations with my reporting manager at Applied did not go very well.
“What’s the role of a data consultant,” he asked?
I explained that a data consultant oversees the entire process of requirement gathering, user stories, hypothesis creation, development, insights generation, and validation. My reporting manager felt that this is too much jargon and here is one person who has no technical skills.
Coming from a Mathematical and Statistical background, he had an opinion that reporting was a mundane task and did not require very special skills. In our team of four, two of us (a designer and I) were considered as add-ons, because we did not possess any tool or programming language skill that could be made use of.
I had just two options, either go to some other project or make my manager happy by taking up the tasks that he did not enjoy doing. I started doing the latter.
To start off, I sent out emails to all the people who he had to coordinate with, to build reports. Secondly, he had some pet projects that he wanted to take up and show as PoCs to his seniors.
However, he did not know where the data for these resided and how to bring them together. I did all the liaisoning work and understood the table structures, the connecting linkages and wrote queries to bring the data in a structured format. I also prepared a document to understand the process flow. Probably, he saw some value in this. He even suggested that this should be incorporated in all the reports that we develop.
The work that he was doing captured my interest. I googled out how to perform an EDA, the uses of the Naïve Bayes algorithm and the elements of the feature selection process. I once asked him about the usage of the chi-square test in feature selection. He then stared at for me a few seconds in disbelief and proceeded to explain about the chi-square and F-test in detail. This was the moment when I transformed from an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan.
Apart from this, getting to know a little bit about his personal life, his interests in mixed martial arts and marathon training helped us get along well with each other.
The icing on the cake was the time when he nominated me for the spot award. This was indeed a proud moment as he saw some merit in the work I did and considered it worthy of praise.
What else have I done/learned?
- Accidentally stepped into the Container Corporation of India premises, lost my way, and took a ride in a truck to reach ITPL.
- Realized that trains (the southern railways MEMU DEMU) are the fastest way to commute to Whitefield.
- A shady bar–cum–restaurant called Ankur at Hoodi serves the best curd rice.
Note: This blog is written by Anantha Ramesh, Lead Data Consultant at Gramener.
interesting experience Anantha, that manager felt DC role wasn’t necessary because they had someone else doing similar job at their end? from the follow-up account doesn’t seem like it.
Good one Anantha, It is not an easy task to change one’s mindset by showing your skills and capabilities. Keep the hard work and move on. Congratulations for the award.