Previous: Dan's Hunt for Data Science Consultant [2/5]
Oscar starts his new data science job immediately. He has one week’s overlap with Ryan. On the very first day, as Oscar logs into his company laptop, he sees a recurring meeting invite from Ryan. The first meeting is on the same day afternoon.
In the afternoon meeting, Ryan breaks the news that he is leaving the company in 5 days. Ryan is supposed to complete the knowledge transfer to Oscar by Friday noon. That was a bit of shock for Oscar because at the previous job he has had at least 6 weeks of onboarding, training, and networking with his new team members. After that, he got assigned to a consulting client for a data science project.
Oscar and Ryan have had intensive and long sessions of knowledge transfer. Oscar could only take notes without trying out things. He didn't have all the access to different systems yet. So, he did not get a chance to run and test code or any of the processes. On his last day, Ryan wished Oscar all the best for the challenge he was up to.
Oscar’s real work starts on the first day of next week. He attends the first weekly project meeting. In that meeting, he comes to know that he has only one month to deliver the machine learning model to the ML engineering team. The engineering team would then be able to put the model into a pre-production environment and integrate it with the rest of the business processes. If that does not happen in a timely fashion, the project could be delayed.
Oscar realizes that he has a significant amount of work to do in the next four weeks. Ryan had completed the data exploration phase and was amidst the feature engineering phase of the machine learning model building process. Oscar lacked business knowledge, as he had never worked in this business domain, and could sense the challenge it may pose when it comes to feature engineering. Though we is well aware of the importance of feature engineering and its impact on model training.
Sooner Oscar started raising his concern about the lack of time required to complete the remaining model building work. Dan, a reasonable person, was able to understand the concern. Dan knows that almost three weeks do not count due to Ryan’s departure. Dan brings this up with his leadership. The leadership is nice enough to understand the situation and gives three additional weeks to complete the project. Oscar is trying his best but things are not making much progress.