u/SkipGram

I have seen some discussion on this course here and it has led me to revisit taking it. I work in a role where there's lots of text data, and opportunity to work with social media posts about the brand if we can gather that data.

I looked at the syllabus and it gave a vague outline that sounds like it could support this, but no concrete list of topics covered by week. I'm taking ANLP this semester and am trying to assess if adding AUD after would make sense or if there's overlap.

I've spent the past few years at what feels like a somewhat dysfunctional company. Our Data Science and Engineering teams are very siloed away from the rest of the company, including the teams we support and build things for. IC individuals rarely interact with those requesting the work, and myself and many of my peers have the common challenge of needing to talk to the people who asked for what we're building, but we're often told no we can't go talk to them. This is one of our biggest pain points, and it makes it very difficult to know if I'm making the most sensible choices given the goals of the work.

In the small amount of conversations I have been able to be in with our non-tech teams, it feels like there's this constant tension. Some of my team's 'vision' for the future feels more like changing another area's business strategy instead of using Data Science to support them with their actual stated strategy. Maybe these two things can work towards the same goals in the future, but from the small amount I've seen now, we're rowing in a different direction than the teams we're supposed to be helping, and I'm worried this will harm trust and the ability to influence in the future if there are places we want to suggest different ways of approaching a problem. I'm not in enough of the conversations I need to be in to have this context though.

Is it like this at other companies? I know the economy and job market are pretty rough right now, but as I'm thinking about longer term decisions, I want a company where there's a functional relationship between business and technology and those of us building can actually speak to the people we're building for. Building the best technical solution doesn't matter if it doesn't actually help the people it's for, or have a way to be incorporated into current processes. I'm just not sure how to assess this from the outside or how common this is.

Hey all, would really appreciate some advice. I'm relatively early career (3.5 years, same company) and am struggling with my current manager. I was really excited to finally have a female manager, but she's without a doubt the worst out of the 5 managers I've had here.

She's hyper competitive (self-described) and this shows up in work. She's sent my work to stakeholders without including me on the share-out or any reference to me for questions. She manages work not people, and only knows how to supervise work not how to actually unblock or help employees or help them develop if their career goals are anything other than being a copy of her. Her network is incredibly small for her tenure at the company, and primarily limited to the direct area we work in, meaning any time help is needed outside that area she's not able to do anything other than email, and she is very hesitant to set up meetings and built those relationships proactively.

She also talks very poorly about the area of the business we support. I've seen that a lot in people who went through the internal development program she did, others from that path have insulted the direct area I moved from before joining our tech arm. It's really uncomfortable, and as a result I don't feel welcome or able to bring that background, but I don't think anyone really cares or actually wanted me to do that. At the same time, the area I'm in cares much more about output than outcomes and never tries to actually make sure the work we do is helpful and useful to our customers (internal teams), and if the areas we support try to communicate that we just make fun of them (not to their faces, but still, I've seen it for 2/3 areas I've supported).

The biggest challenge is that she just makes so many assumptions and is so uncurious. It's gone so far as to make assumptions about my personality that are simply untrue, even if small (calling me an extrovert because I reach out and build relationships proactively, try to remember details about colleagues, find areas to collaborate, etc.) I've been incredibly introverted forever, I score that on any personality test, and it's just something I know about myself. It's that kind of thing but in many different areas, she won't try to understand anyone else's perspective, if she asks questions they are framed in a way to reinforce her being right.

I've scored in the top 20% of organizational ratings for as long as I've been at this company. Advice people give me is to remember why she hired me, but she didn't hire me. I've been punted across different teams since joining the tech org, and have still managed to accomplish things. Yet she still doesn't seem interested in anything about me, my background (which is job relevant) or anything. I worked hard to get the job I have, and I don't want to leave in this job market if I can avoid it. But I hate going to work, I hate my 1x1s, and nothing I do actually helps anyone in any way. Is there any way to come back from this or do I just need to start job searching? I wouldn't be the first person to leave the team this year, but if I can change the situation I'd prefer to if possible.

Thanks for reading this far if you did, any advice is super appreciated.

I always struggle to find good summer courses, and from what I've heard ANLP is a good fit to the shorter semester without losing content/being overly rushed. I haven't taken DL or CDA though, and plan to take them both in the future.

I'm wondering if this will hurt me in ANLP though, since I know DL is behind a lot of word vectors and modern NLP approaches. It sounds like the course still does some work with fundamentals though, it's not all neural network-based NLP.

If you did one way or the other I'm just curious what people's thoughts would be on this. I am doing NLP work at my job and even an intro to the topics that use DL would be helpful, but I don't want to not get as much out of the course by taking it at the wrong time.