
Ask HN: Should I focus on going deep or going wide career wise? - freddieoduks
Hi HN, so I currently work as a Junior Data Scientust for a fintech firm but one of my main goals is actually to start my own company soon. So at the moment I&#x27;m wondering whether I should focus on going deep and studying extra to keep to become a really good data scientist (currently I consider myself below average e.g I won&#x27;t be able to get a DS job at a top hi-tech firm right now) or should I focus on going wide, maybe shifting towards a product management role to help me better prepare for life as a founder (even though I want to be technical I&#x27;m not sure I can ever get to the point of being a top 25% Data scientist&#x2F;Coder but suspect I can do this with being a PM as it contains a wide range of skills that I think I have or can develop quickly). I&#x27;m not looking for someone to answer this directly but rather to give me a framework or mental model to use to make a decision.<p>Thanks!
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charlesdm
This is a decision that likely does not matter at all to the success of your
company. The number one skill you're likely forgetting about now is sales.

You need to figure out how to talk to people and sell them things.

~~~
noir_lord
Not just selling them things but selling yourself _first_.

Before I was a full time programmer I was a salesman when I was young (I'm by
nature an introvert so it wasn't anything that was natural, I had to _learn_
to do it and I got good at it - The company I worked for I held the highest
sales for the district and the 3rd highest average order value over the
company (150ish locations)) and after a while I realised that 'people buy
people' with the product often been secondary (turns out all those 'CTO made
the choice over a round of golf with <IBM|Oracle"> sales manager' jokes have a
basis of truth, they figured it out decades ago).

It's also something of an awkward truth in that as programmers we like to
think we pick thinks for objective considered reasons rather than because we
like the person pushing them but then I used to watch the tech industry go
nuts after a Job's sales event and think..maybe not so much.

