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Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

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Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#31
post #27
post #13

I'll be completely honest, as your standard "data scientist" who hopped on the bandwagon and came from having a PhD in academia in an unrelated field, I cringe at these articles. I'm not entirely sure why. I think it may be two-fold: 1. A little bit of the selfish "oh no, the secret's out, at what point is my salary going to drop when the demand is met by the dedicated Master's degrees and bootcamps?" and 2. These ar…

Just add a grain of AI or blockchain and you’ll be fine!

Do a linear regression, call it ML with AI and you'll be running your own team in a week

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#32
Stuff like this makes me concerned that subsequent generations will have a really bizarre/erroneous understanding of what science is. I'm an analyst/developer who frequently has their work referred to as 'Data Science', and the scientific method could not apply less to my work.

This and similar titles strike me as being created by PMs / other business-side people who were struggling come up with a name for their "Extra Double-Senior Superanalyst Who Can Do Some Programming Also".

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#33
post #6

Unfortunately a lot of the "Data Scientist" I meet are nothing more than excel / sheets gurus. Most of them have never written a line of code or syntax that is more complex than a nested vlookup. I hope the tide changes here and I think it will, but this has been my experience so far.

That's what I see too with the data scientists at my company. They run a few SQL queries and create spreadsheets. Nothing really groundbreaking.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#34
post #14
post #6

Unfortunately a lot of the "Data Scientist" I meet are nothing more than excel / sheets gurus. Most of them have never written a line of code or syntax that is more complex than a nested vlookup. I hope the tide changes here and I think it will, but this has been my experience so far.

I had a feeling that in Europe, a lot of those jobs run under Data Analyst. Data Scientist roles at small companies can go in that direction but most that I've interacted with strictly don't do Excel anymore where possible. Mostly because they found out that turnover is very high if you hire Data Scientists for VLOOKUPS, so you'd better give talented people other tasks to keep them.

If I were European i'd scope up one of those boring jobs and then do another job while at work. Those job protection laws (at least in France) are free money if you work it right

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#35
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just add a grain of AI or blockchain and you’ll be fine!

Do a linear regression, call it ML with AI and you'll be running your own team in a week

Just the other day, I heard someone talking about a "single layer neural network with no activation"...

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#36
post #27
post #13

I'll be completely honest, as your standard "data scientist" who hopped on the bandwagon and came from having a PhD in academia in an unrelated field, I cringe at these articles. I'm not entirely sure why. I think it may be two-fold: 1. A little bit of the selfish "oh no, the secret's out, at what point is my salary going to drop when the demand is met by the dedicated Master's degrees and bootcamps?" and 2. These ar…

Just add a grain of AI or blockchain and you’ll be fine!

Tensor-blockchain with self-driving smart contracts.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#37
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do a linear regression, call it ML with AI and you'll be running your own team in a week

Just the other day, I heard someone talking about a "single layer neural network with no activation"...

with just a single neuron!

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#38
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just add a grain of AI or blockchain and you’ll be fine!

Do a linear regression, call it ML with AI and you'll be running your own team in a week

Hmm... do you offer career counseling services? How can I sign up? ;-)

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#39

Recently I wrote a tweetstorm of my not-so-great experience hunting for a data science job last summer: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/951117788835278848 Despite data science being a hot job, the sheer, growing number of MOOCs available will cause the high amount gatekeeping from many prospective employers to get even worse. I am very happy as a data scientist now, and yes, it's more complicated than doing Exce…

This article makes it sound like you can just walk into a DS position. No. Expect a months-long job search if you don't have a PhD.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#40
post #13

I'll be completely honest, as your standard "data scientist" who hopped on the bandwagon and came from having a PhD in academia in an unrelated field, I cringe at these articles. I'm not entirely sure why. I think it may be two-fold: 1. A little bit of the selfish "oh no, the secret's out, at what point is my salary going to drop when the demand is met by the dedicated Master's degrees and bootcamps?" and 2. These ar…

I don't think it's irrational. As somebody with just a masters in a tangentially related field (economics), I find it surprising how low the barrier to entry is for this job (I got in, after all). Anybody with a decent undergraduate level understanding of stats could learn to do most of the production stuff that companies generally do in a few weeks, at best.
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