I’m a junior data scientist and I have 1 yoe at a medium sized company. Recently my job has made me so anxious I cannot even sleep. Basically, I deployed a model for the first time, and I cited great improvements, but due to holes in my QA, the QA person did not find that the model actually improved that much in production.

Im already anxious enough, but my manager made me even more anxious. He got pretty pissed that this happened.. so he proceeded to publicly shamed me in standup, telling my team of 6 that they should learn from this lesson. In our 1-1, he told me that if our director sees this, it’ll be bad for my reputation, especially if our clients complain about this.

So I asked him if I could get a second pair of eyes on my work. This is because barely anyone helped me with this project. Only one other person helps me with deployment, but they don’t know anything about how this model works. My manager agreed, but he also said that even if the second person looks over my work, they wouldn’t really know what’s happening either. So it’s all up to me to catch stuff like this. And we ended the meeting with no concrete solution.

I get that it’s important to not make mistakes in production, but is it normal to be this tough on a junior? I literally feel so shit right now. I just feel so incapable and I can’t believe I didn’t catch it the first time. I’m literally considering quitting this field if I have to deal with this for another 40 years….

Edit: he also said "i thought you would have a good handle of this by yourself already, but I guess not" 💀

Edit2: thank you all for your reassurance. I have set up a meeting with the QA person to go over stuff before I deploy again. Hopefully I can learn something from them. Wish me luck for the next deployment 🤞