The Alt-Ac Job Beat Newsletter Post 5 2023-12-05

Hi Everyone,

Random tidbit of advice this week is that you do not need to move to San Francisco to get a tech job. Besides remote, there are a few random metro areas that based on whom I interact with I believe are good up and coming markets. Salt Lake, Omaha, Dallas, Raleigh are a few examples that have strong job sectors and are affordable.

Keep applying -- and let me know when you have landed cool gigs!

I will pause updates bi-weekly until the new year, so expect next newsletter in early January -- happy holidays.

JOBS

Job board link

If you would like access to post, reach out (and if you are an employer and want me to share role with network or recruit get in touch!)

EXAMPLE SCIENTIST

Carter Rees (PhD in CJ from SUNY Albany), https://www.linkedin.com/in/cjphd/, currently Head of Machine Learning at Entrata. Carter's increase in roles, starting as data scientist in 2016 and rising to more senior director roles in a few years is common for people with PhDs as well. (Carter's industry gigs are all in Salt Lake area.)

TECH ADVICE

In my opinion, default graphics in all of the stat software have too small of fonts. A simple way to make your graphs look nicer in documents and presentations is to increase the font size and save as high resolution PNG files. Here is my default look in python/matplotlib:

import matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

theme = {'axes.grid': True,
         'grid.linestyle': '--',
         'legend.framealpha': 1,
         'legend.facecolor': 'white',
         'legend.shadow': True,
         'legend.fontsize': 14,
         'legend.title_fontsize': 16,
         'xtick.labelsize': 14,
         'ytick.labelsize': 14,
         'axes.labelsize': 16,
         'axes.titlesize': 20,
         'figure.dpi': 100}

matplotlib.rcParams.update(theme)

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6,4))
... generate plot here
plt.savefig('Highres.png',dpi=500,bbox_inches='tight')

And for R I use ggplot2:

library(ggplot2)

# custom theme
theme_andy <- function(){
  theme_bw() %+replace% theme(
     text = element_text(size = 16),
     panel.grid.major= element_line(linetype = "longdash"),
     panel.grid.minor= element_blank()
) }

p <- ...ggplot .... + theme_andy()
# Save graph
png(file="Highres.png",bg="transparent",height=4,width=6,units="in",res=1000)
p
dev.off()

Best, Andy Wheeler