Legit work from home?

[jasonc]

Office work ,bah no.

The gossiping and men do gossip .

 

[Christ_empowered]

That’s a big part of why I’m hoping for a work from home thing. Even at low wage part time jobs…

With minimal interaction with coworkers…

I end up messed over. True story…

 

[stovebolts]

My brother new a guy who was a trucker, in his 60s, who somehow transitioned into data science and is still consulting; that was about 10 years ago. I figure if he could do it, I can. lol

I drove semi truck for 10 years then tried to get out of it and went into construction building pole buildings which led me to getting my GED and then college for a sheet metal apprentice program. Somehow that translated to exterior metal and flat roofs on commercial buildings.
I had a natural knack for computers and went to an excellerated Computer school for 20 months and landed my first job as an on-site desktop support agent. 7 years ago I moved from operations to innovation which was my entry into databases.

learned some SQL, R, Tableau, and Power BI, and am currently going through a Udemy course that is going through probability, statistics (which I learned formally a few years ago in my degree), Python

We’ve got an entire reporting team dedicated to Power BI and Tableau. Power BI is overtaking Tabeau but I’ve never had an interest for that. People like you are in demand! If your learning Python, I would encourage you to download Postgres as they are part of the same suite and then plug Power BI on top of that.

My brother is in BI and has learned to use quite a number of tools for cleaning data,

That’s my bread and butter for one of my projects. regular expressions can streamline anomalies in dirty data. Honestly, the business world lives in spreadsheets and those spreadsheets are getting imported into databases for analysis. You can scrub the data before you put it in the DB with Python or you can load it in a staging table and scrub it before you move it to a reporting table. The later is my expertise.

It really is quite daunting because there is so much to know and so many directions to go with it all. I am interested in the analysis part of things, as I enjoy stats and have a fairly analytical, detail-oriented mind. I just need to be able to get working soon.

That’s an understatement! The industry is so big it can get really confusing which direction to take. As a result, I’ve niched myself in Oracle and Postgres. Reporting platforms will rise and fall but Oracle isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and there are so many niches within Oracle, there is constant opportunities for growth.

 

[stovebolts]

I have a friend who did an online coding boot camp. She had degrees but she makes more money now.

Having a degree is a good thing, but in information technology their value decreases as time goes on. Very few employers care if you have a degree where you were taught Cobal. They want people who can learn new technology and stay current. A life in IT is a commitment to lifelong learning or demotions or unemployment because your skill set ran its course.

 

[Free]

I drove semi truck for 10 years then tried to get out of it and went into construction building pole buildings which led me to getting my GED and then college for a sheet metal apprentice program. Somehow that translated to exterior metal and flat roofs on commercial buildings.
I had a natural knack for computers and went to an excellerated Computer school for 20 months and landed my first job as an on-site desktop support agent. 7 years ago I moved from operations to innovation which was my entry into databases.

That's fantastic! I honestly love hearing people's success stories, especially the longer, hard fought ones. It all starts somewhere, even if it's getting a GED. There is just so much opportunity these days, if one is willing to apply oneself.

We’ve got an entire reporting team dedicated to Power BI and Tableau. Power BI is overtaking Tabeau but I’ve never had an interest for that. People like you are in demand! If your learning Python, I would encourage you to download Postgres as they are part of the same suite and then plug Power BI on top of that.

I will definitely look into it. Last November or so I joined a local online community dedicated to helping mid-career people transition into tech. When I mentioned to someone that I had learned both Tableau and Power BI, he said, just focus on one. My brother also said Power BI is bigger here, so I have chosen to learn that better, since once you know one, you can usually pick up another quickly. Where I live is quickly becoming a central tech hub in Canada, so opportunities are good.

That’s my bread and butter for one of my projects. regular expressions can streamline anomalies in dirty data. Honestly, the business world lives in spreadsheets and those spreadsheets are getting imported into databases for analysis. You can scrub the data before you put it in the DB with Python or you can load it in a staging table and scrub it before you move it to a reporting table. The later is my expertise.

That’s an understatement! The industry is so big it can get really confusing which direction to take. As a result, I’ve niched myself in Oracle and Postgres. Reporting platforms will rise and fall but Oracle isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and there are so many niches within Oracle, there is constant opportunities for growth.

As I go along, I hope to figure out where a lot of the work is and try and get into a niche and do one or two things really well.

Having a degree is a good thing, but in information technology their value decreases as time goes on. Very few employers care if you have a degree where you were taught Cobal. They want people who can learn new technology and stay current. A life in IT is a commitment to lifelong learning or demotions or unemployment because your skill set ran its course.

So much this. As long as a person can show that they can do the work and learn new things it's hard not to get a job in IT, even without a degree.

You never know, Christ_empowered, it might just start with data entry. Next you're figuring out what happens to the data and then suddenly you're analyzing it and doing reports. Of course, it all depends on your interests and other factors. But there are opportunities to work from home out there. (And, sorry, I didn't mean to overrun your thread with my own discussion.)

 

[Christ_empowered]

Feel free lol

I really hope I can do something and not have to deal with stigma and mind games. Frustrating.,,

 

[Free]

Feel free lol

I really hope I can do something and not have to deal with stigma and mind games. Frustrating.,,

That would be very frustrating. Thankfully, in my 14 years of office experience, I never had to deal with office politics, which is good, since I have no patience for that sort of thing. Apart from some maturity issues, most people I worked with were pretty good. But, every once in a while, I read of horror stories online, and that's without dealing with stigma.

I'm sure you'll be able to find something.

 

[stovebolts]

Free
The most successful reporting gurus know the fundamentals of database structure. Take a database course on Udemy that covers “normal forms” which will also teach you the basics of primary and foreign keys. Normal forms will help you integrate or create datasets that integrate with other data sets. You should understand parent child relationships aka one to many. You don’t want a many to many relationship and most spreadsheets will have a few duplicates on your”key” which if aggregated will pull false numbers.

In other words, anyone can create a cool report, but is that report accurate?

Again, my job as a data engineer is finding those keys and making those relationships along with adding referential integrity. I do all of the hard work so the business or our IT reporting partners can produce accurate reports for the business. However, not all companies have our resources, so it lands all on you to do it all.

If you learn the normal forms and referential integrity, you can do things like build lookup tables which would “normalize” datasets so they can be integrated for reporting. Again, it also ensures accurate reporting.

As you can see, I enjoy what I do! I hope this helps you! It’s a great space to be in.