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Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#81

Post by nilkn »

I don't think it's a waste of time. Even if you can't straight-up get a pure data science job, you can still benefit from having this background:

(1) You could focus on building data processing platforms using, e.g., Spark. This will get you very close to the data science folks and you could probably end up doing some interdisciplinary work if you wanted it and demonstrated enough interest and competence. At the very least, people who can build highly scalable data processing systems and who also have a reasonable understanding of how the data is being used are very valuable.

(2) There are lots of companies out there that don't engage in data science/machine learning at all. You could join such a company and represent the push towards developing a data science or ML division or team. If you're successful this could also get you major credit as a manager as well as putting you very close to real-world data scientists and ML projects.

Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#82

Post by j45 »

badjasper wrote: post #80

I have been working software and IT engineering for almost 35 years. I'm self taught and, never took a college course until about 5 years ago. I have not been out of work for many years now and, the reason for that is the fact that most companies desire people who can hit the ground running. College degrees and books are fine for getting the basics but, what you learn in college is FAR different than what is in the r…

Quite often, Self-directed education + track record > Formal education

Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#83

Post by watty »

carlmcqueen wrote: post #41
quadrature wrote: post #39

A good programmer with even just a high level overview of ML and Stats concepts would be an incredibly valuable asset to a data science team. Most ML people are academics who tend to not have good software engineering skills, finding people who master both domains is really hard. Also to add to that most of the work in ML is feature engineering, data cleaning, testing and building pipelines which all require a good s…

I work for a technical statistical team in the financial world, we've been hiring PHDs lately to my team which has just meant exactly what this comment points out. I do a lot of the grunt work of getting the data sourced, cleaned and ready and am called the 'data wizard' and other such annoying names. What's frustrating is I can run the last lines of code and read and understand the output of the last step, but as th…

Sounds more like a "data monkey" (no offense)

Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#84

Post by Raf_ »

dpflan wrote: post #17

Does anyone have experience with this scenario and actually completed Udacity nanodegrees for Machine Learning or Data Science or AI? Their programs express job placement as a perk of graduation. https://www.udacity.com/nanodegree Educating for the "jobs of the future" is one of Udacity's goals, data scientist being one of those jobs.

I'm half-way through their Deep Learning Foundations nanodegree and I'm generally happy with it.

Note that only selected nanodegrees come with the job placement guarantee, and that the guarantee seems to essentially mean a refund, if you fail to find a job within 6 months. https://www.udacity.com/nanodegree/plus

As a sidenote - the deepest (meta) learning I've gotten is that paying for the course made me much more engaged and determined to invest time in understanding the material and completing assignments.

Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#85

Post by jey »

> it seems that in the real world you won't be allowed anywhere near such a position without having a degree in the subject.

I don't have a degree but work as a data scientist at a research institution. I'm self-taught and was originally hired as a software engineer on the basis of my projects and work experience.

It's true that you have to convincingly make the case for your competence, but a bachelor's degree is really at best a certificate of minimal competency in a subject. Its signalling[1] value quickly gets swamped out by actual work experience where you're continually learning and improving. So there's a great hack: just do actual good work and put it on your resume. Your portfolio of work should convey your competence so well that having a degree wouldn't really add anything. (So you can skip the degree, but you'll still have to put in the work.)

Remember that any healthy organization wants to hire for competence at job duties. If some company rejects you for not having a degree because the hiring manager has to cover their ass to upper management instead of optimizing for getting work done, you should really just be glad that you dodged a bullet.

I think what's most important is to keep growing and learning. Pg had it right: "If you're worried that your current job is rotting your brain, it probably is"[2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)

2. http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#86

Post by daliwali »

I hold a degree in mathematics. Small-minded HR drones have told me I'm not qualified to do programming since I'm not formally trained in computer science. I have been doing this since I was a kid.

Don't listen to them. Every professional will at some point in their career be judged by those less capable.

Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#87

Post by Pandabob »

dpflan wrote: post #17

Does anyone have experience with this scenario and actually completed Udacity nanodegrees for Machine Learning or Data Science or AI? Their programs express job placement as a perk of graduation. https://www.udacity.com/nanodegree Educating for the "jobs of the future" is one of Udacity's goals, data scientist being one of those jobs.

I started the AI engineer nanodegree in April and so far have been happy (https://www.udacity.com/course/artificial-intelligence-nanod...)

The first three months are basically a walkthrough of Peter Norvigs AI book, and the second part will be about deep learning.

Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#88

Post by [deleted] »

daliwali wrote: post #86

I hold a degree in mathematics. Small-minded HR drones have told me I'm not qualified to do programming since I'm not formally trained in computer science. I have been doing this since I was a kid. Don't listen to them. Every professional will at some point in their career be judged by those less capable.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#90

Post by inputcoffee »

I can't answer the question directly, but I will say this: machine learning is a lot of applied math.

Suppose you are setting up a convolutional network to recognize some special object for a company. You will need to understand that math to know what parameters to tweak.

Is it the learning rate? Is it the way you randomized the weights? Is it the activation function?

Although, in fairness, I don't think even a PhD level candidate works out what the reason is likely to be. More than likely they have a few heuristics in their head (oh, it stops learning too soon, let's just drop the learning rate. Oh, it never converges? that activation function can't propagate error and so on).

The point is that you have to know the theory to be useful. It hasn't been worked out. It is very much a living science project. That's the fun of it though.

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