Most of my day today was spent writing a "one pager" demonstrating to senior leadership the impact of my organization. Explaining things to leadership generally who all seem to have caught some kind of reading-induced rabies weekly drains my soul.
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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Machine Learning
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Stupid coding mistakes. Working with faulty data.
Used to be meetings, but we have embraced an anti-meeting culture, replacing it with asynchronous communication.
edit: typo.
How’s async treating you?
Treating me alright. Took some time to get used to, but all in all, I think it was a positive change.
Answering questions, documenting, integrating models into backend applications, and understanding product concerns. A few years ago I would have said data cleaning or model tuning but these processes have become much more mature in the companies I have worked at so i can't afford to spend as much of my time there.
Forms :(
Lunch
meetings
Meetings and the most common way to combine two things:
- multimedia presentation;
- ensure people have paid attention to content.
They allow participation, but comments do that, too.
Screen capture isn’t widely used, but it does help and is typically the first thing that becomes prevalent in remote-asynchronous organizations. A version that I like is Amazon’s six-pagers: meetings have to be discussions about something well-defined ahead of time; therefore, people are expected to read a detailed document to participate. That’s enforced by having people sit silently reading the document for the first 10 minutes.
You can’t make every email a mandatory task because that would mean anyone can drop work on you, but we should normalize adding quizzes to content to highlight what people need to know—like team updates and new processes.
Either stupid coding mistakes, or trying to get results with small modification on the experiments, with no good results.
u/bengaliguy beat me to it! Meetings!
Haha! Do you ever feel like the meetings where you present are a waste of time?
Sometimes, but I try avoid those if I see them coming. The worst thing is a meeting's flow-wrecking potential, even if the meeting itself is relevant.
Task switching from meetings to projects, projects to other projects, or mid day commutes from my home office to work are the worst killers of my productivity. A lot of days I only have about 4-6 hours of thoughtful capacity to work, and reaching 8-10 hours of productivity is difficult beyond that envelope of really good work. Like I struggle to do even simple coding tasks after doing a significant block of writing or refactoring or whatever I spent my productive time on in the morning.
Cleaning
8am meetings where you don't even participate.
Whole day ruined.
RIP
Data wrangling - getting everything formatted correctly before I hit 'train'
I’d hardly call this a waste of time. The majority of machine learning, at the end of the day, is cleaning up your data before using it.
I suppose so - I guess it's just a lot of directory traversal, formatting and moving annotations and images to the right spot. Idk aside from anything overly technical, it's something an intern can do tbh
Databricks. I’d rather just use a local server with spark at this rate.
LOL right? I would rather run the whole project on my banged up macbook pro rather then spending time setting things on databricks
Some people swear by it but I see where you're coming from. Do you use their notebooks a lot?
Meetings with non technical managers who make things worse
Oh I've been there. My first manager didn't know that R-squared is just correlation squared hahaha... how do your managers make things worse specifically?
Daniel
data reconcilliations :(
Loading data. It can take forever to pull my data from whatever database it is in through the VPN internet slow down. Each ask tends to come from a different table, that is just the same original large table, but with whatever org's own special column(s), so it's never the same table. Each one tends to take about 30mins to load, if the kernel doesn't crash while loading it
Power point presentations
Do you have any alternatives? Are you mostly going from a Jupyter Notebook to a powerpoint?
Data pre-processing.
The startup I work at is fairly small so we don't really have anyone who deals with the data itself (e.g., data engineers, data scientists, etc.). That leaves the MLEs to do most of the grunt work.
The people.
Data annotation if there is no training data for computer vision task.
Waiting for IT to install/change things. I don’t have admin access on my work machine. Or endless meetings.
Dealing with the moronic decisions of business majors and their attention seeking attitudes
stress relief
Agile meetings with our absolutely incompetent PMO
My whole job