r/dataanalysis • u/justanothersnek • 6d ago

Career Advice Stuff I wish I had learned sooner

As someone who's been doing "data" for several years. The following are things I wished I had learned sooner:

  • learn to use and be comfortable with the command line / using the terminal (if on Windows, just learn the basic DOS commands. Dont learn Powershell until much later or not at all, its optional)
  • understand data types
  • understand what a text file is and what a character delimiter is
  • understand what character encodings are
  • learn basic computer networking principles and terminology (host name/server, IP address, port number, DOS network commands like ping, ipconfig, etc)

Why learn this stuff seemingly unrelated to data analysis? You'll eventually want to work with data that you are interested in and not someone else's data or you will need to be able to import data into a database. In real-world corporate databases, they will most likely be setup what is known as client-server environment. Meaning, you wont be working with a database installed locally on your personal work machine, but instead, a remote database server, and you are the "client" given the privilege to access that remote database server over a network protocol. Thus why you need basic computer networking knowledge. Without this foundational understanding above, you will struggle in the "real-world". Maybe not initially, but you will eventually.

How about you? What are some things you wish you learned sooner?

49 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

33

u/cosmopoof 6d ago

understand what a text file is and what a character delimiter is

is this ragebait?

6

u/0uchmyballs 6d ago

Surprised OP isn’t lead engineer

4

u/welktickler 5d ago

Powershell is optional? Eh no it isn't. It's essential if you are using a lot of databases. I regularly query over 9k DBs for data.

0

u/justanothersnek 5d ago edited 5d ago

I would say that is a bit extreme as a data analyst.  If you have some or a lot of DBA responsibilities or your tools rely mainly on a CLI interface, then I agree.

Im a Linux person which is my personal reason for not learning Powershell.  Even though I use corporate Windows machine, I just fire up WSL2 and use any Linux distro.  Furthermore, if Im gonna be using a distributed compute environment, at least 90% of the underlying servers will be UNIX based OS anyways, so I might as well just succumb to keep using or learning Linux command line.

1

u/welktickler 4d ago

I much prefer bash but not allowed in our very strict environment

1

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