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15:25
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Q: Is it normal for a skilled data scientist to be considered a "Swiss knife" and have assigned everything but data science tasks?

Iván SánchezTL;DR: My company does not assign me data scientist tasks and I am feeling like I am being wasted. I am currently working in a consultancy firm as a data scientist (four years experience). In general, my work consisted in coding proof of concepts for clients who wanted to check if a problem they ...

" mentoring, integration of other Data Scientists code, debugging, testing, client presentations" sounds like you've become a manager (or at least a mentor) of some kind. Did you start out with data science stuff and your position changed over time? or was it like this from the start? how long have you been in this company?
also, is the work you do tangential to Data Science? ie are you mentoring in data science, debugging that stuff too, etc? do you use your skills even if you're not actively developing code (or w/e)
@stanri Most of the time is debugging code from newbie data scientists, but these are bugs normally to not knowing/applying basic software engineering concepts like abstraction, generalization, etc. It's basically finding code that is being copied and pasted, or code to do something which can be solved very simply by using some library (e.g. pandas) but it is being done with tens of lines of code, and in a very messy way.
See this question: How to diplomatically decline a new tech lead role in a messy outsourced project to go back to a regular programmer role? It's similar, in that (1) they're doing managerial work without a position, and (2) getting involved in tasks that aren't in their skillset. The situations are different but the answers may be relevant.
Did you tell your boss that you're unhappy with the work assignment? There's no good reason a manager will assume as such, so you need to let them know.
Too much bold...
15:25
I’m voting to close this question because it appears to be a role-specific question, not a general workplace question (none of the existing answers address the role-specific aspect, so it could probably just be edited to make it on topic).
"It has reached to a point in which I have not done Data Science for an entire two month" Has anyone else at your company been doing Data Science for the past two months?
"mentoring, integration of other Data Scientists code, debugging, testing," All that sounds like data science to me. Just at a mid or senior level, rather than junior. In every field you need to mentor juniors. Working with others to solve larger problems is also very common. Not every job is going to be "go off and work on your own to solve this small question:.
People don't get tasks assigned based on job title, but based on what they can actually do. If you can do these things and others can't, you will get these tasks assigned and others won't.
Is it normal? Who cares! If this isn't what you want, discuss with your employer.
They have too little data scientist work for you so you get to do chores to earn your pay.
15:25
So other data scientists aren't doing any debugging or testing? That's pretty fundamental for any technical role.. code really, really needs to be tested, and when something is wrong the person who wrote it or is responsible for its maintenance must be able to debug it. These activities are as fundamental as writing the code itself; It's a serious problem if you have people writing code yet aren't doing any kind of testing or debugging (Even worse if they are unable and don't know how..). If you plan to stay in this job then I'd recommend you push for this to change.
Since you have a wide range of deliverables, this is a great opportunity to make the case that you should be a manager, and that you should have some coders/testers/engineers under your management.
16:20
Let's not close this for role-specificity. An archetypical question on here is "my job is not what I thought it would/should be. ...?" Those don't get closed, and this one should not either just because Ivan has elaborated on the context. Duplicate, perhaps.

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