I’m a bartender. At least 75% of my friends have been laid off. Not just bartenders, but servers, bussers, most cooks, managers, and everyone I know who works in hotels as well.
- Could be they have a hobby of computers
- Could be they are still in school
Not everyone who cares about tech news is working in the tech field.
Or was it PHP?
I'm still getting used to the idea that Microsoft might not be all evil. It's a weird feeling :)
One of the all-time smartest people I’ve ever met worked a bar in Bergen, Norway; autodidact in anything which caught his fancy, he could give you a lecture on what brought down the Scythians, serve a new guest and striking up a conversation on advances in semiconductor fabrication with him, picking up where he left off the lecture on the Scythians before heading out to see if any of the patrons outside wanted anything, having a quick word on the Poincaré conjecture with the math postgrad having a beer in the backyard...
He had studied for a while at the university before figuring out that he’d have more time to study if he didn’t have to concern himself with exams, quit, kept his uni library card and got down to it.
All these "non-developers" are priceless when discussions pop up which require domain expertise (which we developers usually lack)
[edit: they are also priceless generally speaking]
I was at a customer site a few months ago installing some test hardware and the guy I was working with was their welder, having been an auto mechanic before and we got into a discussion about programming in Python!
The best interaction, however, would be the homeless guy I met who used to be a programmer.
(I guess that could kinda be a spoiler for an almost 100 year old film?)
Not programming but the other wacky transition was a Wall St guy who burnt out, started a subsistence farmstand in the country, married a hippie lady and sold vegetables, drove a school bus and plowed snow to get by. Really nice guy... when he died it turned out he owned a few buildings in NYC and was loaded to the tune of $20-30M, and his family had no clue.
Needless to say, I have little sympathy for those claiming a talent shortage.
I don't really have anything against Chollets book, but introduction to statistical learning is an absolutely fantastic introduction to the modelling part of data science.
Start there to get better intuitions, then practice practice practice.
It helps if you try to get data to answer your own questions, as there's a lot more motivation in doing that rather than Iris or MNIST.