u/thro0away12

I have 8 years of experience and just few years in my current corporate job in biotech. I used to shine at my old jobs and here I just feel dumb constantly. It's not like I don't know things - it's just there so much going on at all times and it's very overwhelming to know what to prioritize between deadlines and "high impact" work that will make me visible and leave good impressions.

I work in data so when I first join my team, I had a good first project. However, later things just started to go downhill after I was handed off somebody else's project that was thousands of lines of very complicated and messy code. Even after trying to use AI to simplify the code, it didn't work and I really just had to do it myself while also being bound to a very tight 1-2 day turnaround. When I did the exact change the project manager (who seemed to know the project well) asked, it broke something downstream and they asked me to reverse it immediately. Our infrastructure at the time couldn't support immediate reversals - and they seemed to have gotten pissed off at me ever since. My manager I felt started to overcompensate so I don't make a bad impression if the things upstream of me breaks or what have you. I started to have conversations about how we need to improve our documentation and tech debt practices, but I had no opportunity to focus on that with the volume of high priority deadlines that would come constantly.

Few months ago, I switched to a new project and something I'm looking forward to after getting overwhelmed by my last project. I'm spending more time getting oriented and there are corporate wide company initiatives I didn't pay attention to just keeping up with my project. It turns out that there was a competition that I could have been more proactive in participating in folks from my team won - which was an opportunity for high visibility in my team. Our manager talked about how we need to be more proactive in taking initiative and stepping up and gave examples of how my team members who are overloaded with work are still participating. Meanwhile, I feel like I'm just not able to balance everything anymore alongside my regular life responsibilities like cooking, cleaning, eating well and what have you.

I do like some things I'm doing at my job, but I feel behind - I also don't know if it was a mistake to go into data science with my nontraditional science background. I had colleagues in my past jobs who were at the same level as me but went into other roles (non-data science related) and are directors now. I feel like I am not going to really get promoted in my current job - most of my more talented colleagues are still at the same level for years.

I currently work in biotech as a data scientist with a health professional degree and masters in clinical research (heavy epidemiology methods/statistics focus). I've been here for about few years now but previously had experience in healthcare analytics in other work settings. The work is okay: my colleagues are really talented and there is interesting work going on, but I feel like tech debt and lack of ownership with projects is real. As somebody who is newer on my team - I've felt like many of my projects weren't end-to-end but I came somewhere in between to fix existing issues that can get tedious quickly and I feel like getting promoted is really hard.

I used to work in government some years ago and colleagues at the same level as me left their job the same time I did but in a different function than DS and are already at the director level in a span of a few short years. It's making me wonder if DS in pharma/biotech is worth it or not or what else I can pivot to - I know vaguely of RWE, HEOR, epidemiology, medical affairs, etc. in pharma but I don't know what a day-in-the-life is really like in these roles - I just wonder if these are better supported than roles in data science.

I work in data science in a biotech/pharma company with an epidemiology/biostatistics background - in my previous jobs, I worked with colleagues who had a similar background but had much stronger research skills rather than programming skills in R or Python. This is where I felt I really shined because I loved using both to develop solutions that automated critical processes, data visualization tools and all. My technical skills I felt were my strongest asset in my career.

Both me and my research colleagues eventually switched into biotech - however, I work specifically in a data science team while they work in other roles. In the past 2 years, I've been really confused with my trajectory, especially the feeling that I focused a lot on technical skills that there is a push for AI to automate. Although I have a more balanced approach to AI in that I feel that even if AI can produce technical solutions, it still needs a lot of description and steering to get it to work the way it should - I still have this "what am I doing" feeling. I don't really have in-depth knowledge of the therapeutics I work with even though I try to set time to learn the domain knowledge and network with colleagues who have been working on the projects I've just gotten started on for years. My job over the last few years has felt really confusing as my team struggles with technical debt, lack of ownership and the myriad of other things. Moreover, I don't really see myself getting promoted - I started here with a senior DS role after having nearly a decade of experience and while I try to network extensively with my colleagues and take initiative, I feel like I might be stuck at this level for a while.

I look at my colleagues who were in research roles in previous jobs and they quickly got promoted to director roles in pharma in a span of just a few years. It's making me wonder if becoming a DS with a healthcare background was really worth it - data science in biotech/pharma feels very behind both in terms of organizational maturity and salary compared to tech and even other areas of biotech - but I do find the domain knowledge projects I work on more meaningful to me than the possibility of working at Meta or Amazon, say. It has me wondering if I should (or even can) switch to something else in pharma- but the thing is, I don't even know what to look for or what the titles/skills even actually mean or how my skills would be transferrable. I spoke to a colleague in medical affairs and when they explained the job, it felt like I would be jumping into a whole new world and bit of an unknown territory that I'm not sure I'd even like. I'm wondering if anybody else has been in this position and can offer advice - should I say in DS in biotech and grow my career here or leave data science for a role/function in pharma/biotech with an epidemiology/biostatistics background?

I work in a technical role in a biotech company - I made this move years ago after previously completing a healthcare degree. I've always found myself working 10x harder in my career - I personally feel like being a minority, woman and looking a bit younger for my age made it difficult to be treated seriously throughout my career, at times even unprofessionally. When I was a student, I'd tell my friends some things supervisors had told me and they were shocked that made me realize the way I was frequently treated exception and not norm. After feeling demoralized in healthcare practice, I pivoted to a non-practicing/scientific area as I still enjoyed clinical stuff, just not my field really. I went back to school, did a master, taught myself technical skills and really shined with those skills. I developed solutions that people hadn't seen before and felt confident about myself and my work.

With AI and my current job, my confidence is starting to slowly shatter. In my company, it feels like people just know stuff about project domains as if it's second nature whereas I'm trying to catchup. Moreover, being in a technical space, again I'm a woman here and many people I work with are men and contractors overseas. Most are nice but some are kind of dry and don't respond to my messages - I'm on a new team now and wasn't using AI too much because my previous team wasn't using the most up-to-date skill. When I showed one of my colleagues my project, he just said "no offense, if you had <x tool> you could have done this in one day".

But even after getting access to the tool, it's not taking me 1 day - even when AI develops a solution and it looks amazing at first, I do have to check it - and there have been times it wasn't the best solution or used something deprecated. I feel however, in corporate, speed matters more than quality and the onus is on me to do things that will make AI "do better" rather than use AI in a hybrid approach as I am now. I'm starting to get demoralized and worried about the future of my career this way....I'm just not sure where else to pivot at this stage. I'm wondering if others feel similarly