Yes, you are too late. Instead, focus on data critique. There is a big market for that as the robot armies of AI experts are doing incredible harm to society.
Ask HN: Am I too late for the “Data Science” wave?
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Re: Ask HN: Am I too late for the “Data Science” wave?
#72No, never too late to learn.
Re: Ask HN: Am I too late for the “Data Science” wave?
#73Yes, you are too late. But if you retrain and become a data critic, you are definitely ahead of the curve ;) The robot armies of AI experts and big data scientists are doing incredible harm to society. There is a real task for you there.
Re: Ask HN: Am I too late for the “Data Science” wave?
#74Yes, you are too late. But if you retrain and become a data critic, you are definitely ahead of the curve ;) The robot armies of AI experts and big data scientists are doing incredible harm to society. There is a real task for you there.
Hijacking the top comment because it's plain wrong.
1/ No there's no "incredible harm" to the society, not more than any technological revolution in the past and it's bringing more good than bad, like any technological revolution.
2/ You can perfectly do a data scientist formation (or preferably a ML formation), there are thousands of free courses on the net but if you get into a reknowned formation it's better, and go find work. Also try to find a niche such as embedded systems, or robotics, or whatever is scarcer than doing "image recognition" lol
Re: Ask HN: Am I too late for the “Data Science” wave?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - If you're already employed with your agriculture PhD, there must be a number of opportunities for you apply the techniques that you're currently learning wihout leaving the industry. That's probably the path that I would suggest - it would allow you to expand your skillset without taking big risks and you'll have more options in the future. Use the career capital that you already have and explore your options ins…
In general, domain knowledge is incredibly valuable and will generally trump someone who may have some more technical skills but doesn't know the field. I'd add that a lot of larger companies--heard someone from Shell talking about this a couple months ago--are training up people who have knowledge of the business with "citizen data scientist" skill sets. Without knowing all the details of your situation, it seems at…
Your comment will forever be under rated due to how spot on it is. It's a fundamental issue in tech that people don't appreciate. While yes, some problems are universal and general tech can solve them without industry experience, I'm pretty sure most people agree that those problems are either solved or there's an army of devs already on it. These days it's not really enough to just be a dev or data sci. You need to know a field and apply your tech knowledge in better ways than the uninitiated would never imagine.
Re: Ask HN: Am I too late for the “Data Science” wave?
#76Agriculture PhD plus even modest data science skills is hugely in demand at the giant ag-biotech company where I work. Many of the data engineers I lead are former science PhDs. Literally all of our people strategy discussions in R&D are about how we need more people like you. There are only a handful of big science companies left in ag, but I bet the other ones have similar needs.
Re: Ask HN: Am I too late for the “Data Science” wave?
#77Yeah it's too late now, people already moved to data engineering ;-)
Joking aside, this is a very good overview of data science and engineering for the year 2020:
Re: Ask HN: Am I too late for the “Data Science” wave?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general, domain knowledge is incredibly valuable and will generally trump someone who may have some more technical skills but doesn't know the field. I'd add that a lot of larger companies--heard someone from Shell talking about this a couple months ago--are training up people who have knowledge of the business with "citizen data scientist" skill sets. Without knowing all the details of your situation, it seems at…
Your comment will forever be under rated due to how spot on it is. It's a fundamental issue in tech that people don't appreciate. While yes, some problems are universal and general tech can solve them without industry experience, I'm pretty sure most people agree that those problems are either solved or there's an army of devs already on it. These days it's not really enough to just be a dev or data sci. You need to…
The problem is that real world, physical business data is taken from what one can get, not what one would want. And usually "what the business was collecting for (unrelated purpose)."
This means it has nearly infinite caveats and assumptions. A specifications doc or readout will never sufficiently express all of these. Especially if humans were involved in the data generated.
Consequently, the most useful data products are going to turn on whether of not you (did this small thing) to (correct for this obvious bias or flaw that anyone familiar with the industry knows).
Re: Ask HN: Am I too late for the “Data Science” wave?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is true. I found that for embedded C++ to be successful, you need to have some good (excellent sometimes was harmful, but that's a different topic) C++ _as well as_ good domain and optimization skills. It's a combination that is more and more scarce. C++ tends to be used in domains where size and speed matter. You need to know what the compiler and machine will do with your code to be fast. And what's more, only…
> I found that for embedded C++ to be successful, you need to have some good (excellent sometimes was harmful, but that's a different topic) Why were excellent C++ skills sometimes harmful?
First of all, it leaves the team behind if you use features that are too advanced. Makes collaboration hard if you have wildly diverging skills (in both ways).
Also, it did in our case take you away so far from the bare metal, that the code was elegant, but slow. It did not play well with our static allocators and allocated/deallocated way too much, especially temporaries.
You might i.e. check out talks like [0].
Re: Ask HN: Am I too late for the “Data Science” wave?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is a big oversupply of people for the junior-mid level data science jobs. Honest question is there any field where that isn’t true right now? Seems like there are no junior jobs in any sector.
German here. From my perspective it's hard to find - embedded systems programmers, meaning people who know real-time systems, have good C/C++ knowledge, know their way around the Linux kernel and are also able to do basic things with a scope. - good(!) C++ programmers in general - people who know devops and software development infrastructure C++ might not be sexy, but there's a vast amount of legacy software out the…
It's funny because I have all these (though it's been a few years since I've been doing C++ development daily), yet if I were laid off tomorrow I know from experience it could take me a whole year to find a new job in any of that domain.
By the way junior C++ developer is an euphemism because no company will hire a junior C++ developer. It's the most difficult programming languages that can take years of practices/studying to be able to use.