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Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

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Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#41

Post by kitanata »

I recently quit a gig and spent a few months looking for a data science/machine learning gig. I was surprised just how gatekeeped these positions were. Everyone wanted a PhD or a masters degree. I have 15 years of experience in software. I’ve done everything to low level game programming and graphics programming to web development, to AI (but not as a specific position title).

The gatekeeping in this field surprised me because in my study of data science and machine learning I did not think the practical use of these techniques was that hard. The math isn’t even that hard if you had to implement these algorithms from scratch. It’s just linear algerbra and calculus, which anyone with an engineering degree is going to at least have exposure to. I couldn’t get the time of day from anyone. Not even a call back to prove that I knew or could learn what was needed to be effective. It was incredibly frustrating and disappointing.

Data science / machine learning is not that hard, and you are turning away good candidates for bullshit reasons. Stop it. At least bring them in and talk to them. Jesus.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#42

Post by throwaway77384 »

pmcollins wrote: post #10

My wife is a data scientist and this is one of her favorite quotes, from Dan Ariely: Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it... https://www.facebook.com/dan.ariely/posts/904383595868

This is beautiful

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#43

Post by tzahola »

sannee wrote: post #35
frockington wrote: post #31

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"...

Genius.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#44

Post by boxy310 »

kitanata wrote: post #41

I recently quit a gig and spent a few months looking for a data science/machine learning gig. I was surprised just how gatekeeped these positions were. Everyone wanted a PhD or a masters degree. I have 15 years of experience in software. I’ve done everything to low level game programming and graphics programming to web development, to AI (but not as a specific position title). The gatekeeping in this field surprised…

Well - there _is_ a bit of Student's Paradox involved in requirements-gathering for machine learning or analytics, and it's not always apparent that you're using the right algorithm for the problem or what specific metrics you actually need to be optimizing. Most of the time when I've gone through User Story collection processes, the actual end-state users describe is vague, not based on hypothesis testing, and not supportable by the data available onhand. A big part of this process is discovering what the data _can_ tell you, and if necessary to rewrite the technical requirements entirely to align with the actual business need.

Even when a customer's given me a "clean" dataset, I've had to write 400+ lines of code to do the feature engineering on a relatively straightforward logistic regression. Then there's all the other times when a customer asks me to deploy one type of algorithm, and their business problem is actually solved by an entirely different class of algorithm entirely.

Zayd over at Stanford has a nice blog post [1] describing why machine learning is several more dimensions of complexity compared to traditional software development. There _is_ a specific set of Data-first skills that is complemented by dev and CS experience, but a fundamental reason why ML projects fail is due to lack of appreciation for the many different skillsets needed to succeed.

[1] http://ai.stanford.edu/~zayd/why-is-machine-learning-hard.ht...

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#45

Post by arca_vorago »

I'm currently pursuing my data science degree after my last burnout as a senior sysadmin. I'm hoping my practical experience will be a perfect augmentation of the "data science" stuff so that I can be more confident when bringing the board or the execs proposals about how to fix things.

Let me tell ya'll all a little secret. Execs have been mismanaging infrastructure... and it's all so close to crumbling at the first puf-o-wind.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#46

Post by CalRobert »

danmg wrote: post #17
ryguytilidie wrote: post #8

Recruiter here. Data Science is one of ~3 roles I generally don't recruit for. Not because Data Scientists are super hard to find, but more because companies seem to all want data scientists and all want them to do completely different things and none of them really understand those things. Makes for a pretty lame hiring experience unfortunately. :(

For every 'real' data science job which requires deep knowledge of statistics and machine learning, there are 50 DBA positions where they want you to know some python.

I was hired as a "technical game data scientist" and all I do is fix stuff with python, celery, redis, and if I'm lucky Redshift. To be fair, they know this isn't really "data science" but it's always what needs to happen in the next sprint so anything interesting is shoved out.

I think a lot of companies are hiring "data engineers" but don't know it. The guy who started making Superset (https://github.com/apache/incubator-superset) wrote this and I think it's apt.

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-rise-of-the-data-enginee...

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#47

Post by make3 »

kitanata wrote: post #41

I recently quit a gig and spent a few months looking for a data science/machine learning gig. I was surprised just how gatekeeped these positions were. Everyone wanted a PhD or a masters degree. I have 15 years of experience in software. I’ve done everything to low level game programming and graphics programming to web development, to AI (but not as a specific position title). The gatekeeping in this field surprised…

In real life, problems are hard and require theoretical investigation to do well.

That's the actual job! The theoretical investigation. Not the programming. The programming is really easy. which is part of why having 15 years in software doesn't have so much weight.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#48

Post by CuriouslyC »

kitanata wrote: post #41

I recently quit a gig and spent a few months looking for a data science/machine learning gig. I was surprised just how gatekeeped these positions were. Everyone wanted a PhD or a masters degree. I have 15 years of experience in software. I’ve done everything to low level game programming and graphics programming to web development, to AI (but not as a specific position title). The gatekeeping in this field surprised…

I had the same experience in my last job search. I only did a bachelors. Even with many projects on my resume that were completely data science focused, my response rate was almost zero for those types of positions. My response rate was very good otherwise. It's frustrating. Based on my conversations at data science/analytics meetups, my knowledge is greater than that of the average employed data scientist.

My suggestion is to get a job somewhere with a data science team, do a data science side project with company data, and demo it to the data scientists. That is probably your best bet to get a foot in the door.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#50

Post by calvinbhai »

Looks like this article is well timed for the first batches of MS in Data Science grads who'll start looking for jobs soon. I'm not a data scientist, but I feel Data science field is still quite vague, and the terms ML, AI, Deep Learning etc are thrown around so much, its hard to understand or make a guess as to how much real demand is there for such jobs.
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