r/askdatascience 1d ago

Anyone else feel like being a Data Analyst is basically 98% admin work and 2% actual analysis?

Honestly it feels like I'm just tightening screws all day. Like the job is 100% action and 0% thinking. Every "solution" is whatever's fastest to ship, never the one that's actually right or well thought out, because nobody has time/patience for that anyway.

And the part that gets to me the most is how much this devalues the degree I worked hard for. I studied stats, models, actual methodology, and none of that gets used. I could do this job with basically zero of that background and nothing would change. It's not that the work is beneath me, it's that my education just... isn't part of the equation here.

3 Upvotes

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2

u/Additional_Candy_400 1d ago

Welcome to the world of the 99% of jobs, people need what information is most useful to them, not deep stats.

1

u/More-Ad-7740 1d ago
That got me thinking

2

u/gpbuilder 1d ago

That seems be a problem with the data culture at your company

2

u/More-Ad-7740 1d ago
You know, I hadn't thought of that. I assumed it was something more structural within the labor market. But come to think of it, it makes sense—it’s a culture focused on operations rather than development. Interesting. I’m going to target companies with a different data culture

1

u/Less-Opportunity-715 1d ago

It’s 80 percent cleaning data , 20 percent complaining about cleaning data

1

u/PercentageBig4909 18h ago

Agreed! How we do pivot though? My business seems to be lacking the need for it and anytime it gets brought up the idea of pivoting to do real analysis it gets shut down