Some principles I find helpful

Some general career thoughts:

• Don’t be bored - sometimes I’ve sat passively through things and done sloppy work in a disinterested way. But when I lean in and engage, I’ve found there are ways to do things better and differently, and I’ve always found there are ways to improve. And if nothing else, finishing the boring work faster gives me time to do the more interesting stuff later!

• Learn how to tackle aversive tasks - there are tasks that we feel reluctant to do, and try to avoid thinking about them. They’re the things that slide down the to-do list time and again. I think it’s important to spot these aversive tasks, and find ways to tackle them - it feels great when you’ve finally blasted through one!

• Complexity is cost - more complex systems might seem better suited but they have a huge downside in higher maintenance costs. Also, complexity creates knowledge bottlenecks on a few people and makes it harder to bring new people along.

Data science and software engineering

All of the points above, plus:

• Build pipelines - whatever process you’re doing, you probably haven’t got it right first time. If you’re anything like me, there’ll be loads of tiny changes and debugging, and probably many more than you expect. So you want your sequence of steps to be easily rerunnable. This means an investment in time, perhaps several hours or more to set up an automated pipeline.