It’s just starting to get chilly here in Canada so naturally I want to read about someone who’s colder than I‘m about to be.
I love a good ghost story set in a wintery wilderness (e.g. Dark Matter by Michele Paver), but I’m open to anything. Bonus points for the arctic or dark forests.
edit: thanks so much for the responses everyone! Loads of great recs
Hi all, I'm re-entering the hiring process after yet another mass layoff and I've been thinking about how my recent work will be perceived by the hiring machine in 2026. My broader question is around whether the stakeholder management type soft skills that people say are valuable, are actually looked for/selected for by hiring managers - did I hurt my chances by taking a less technical role immediately out of PhD?
A bit of context, I finished my PhD in Comp-Neuro in 2024, working primarily on using computer vision focused ML to extract complex information from auditory neural activity. I was applying for DS roles initially and got a couple of interviews, but my first decent job offer was in a consultancy with a less technical focus (in large part AI safety, working out where companies with data protection obligations can implement AI without it all going pear-shaped or getting sued) - I desperately needed a post-PhD income stream, and the money was decent.
The work was not a DS role, I did a fair bit of data analysis but it was research-focused, not on deployment, and we didn't use the classic tools like databricks, apache spark etc. What I did do was a large amount of stakeholder management with our clients, which included some major US/Canadian corporations/govt departments - working out what their problem was and how we could help them, aligning the exec bluster from what the engineering/product/legal teams thought was actually feasible, etc. This included working directly with the C-suites of a couple of major Canadian banks.
On a personal level I learned a huge amount in these roles, but I'm concerned that because I was not actively working in a DS role, building technical stuff and coding every day, I've essentially created a gap in my resume that recruiters with a list of nouns to match would see as worthless.