For my meetup I went to a virtual meeting of the New York Pythong meetup Group, which is the largest python meetup group on meetup.com. The meetup was held on discord. I had some interesting conversations with a couple of people. I told them where I was in my python journey: that I am taking an introduction to programming course in python, have a background in R, and plan on pursuing machine learning coursework to eventually land a data science job.

Both of the people I had in-depth conversations with were trying to learn more advanced python skills to land a data engineering job. I was very surprised to learn that both of them were having trouble landing these jobs, despite one having a bachelors in computer science, and one having a masters in computer science. This made me think about how wide and deep python learning is. You can consider yourself an expert in closure but know nothing about machine learning. This made me think that going forward, as I pursue my python learning journey further, I should be more intentional about what path I go towards. I should master specific packages instead of trying to be more of a generalist. It also was a bit scary hearing people with strong backgrounds express their disappointment at the job market. Hopefully, I will be able to leverage my background and sell myself in a way on the job market that will put me at an advatnage over people with traditional computer science backgrounds.