My wife will be attending a university based data science boot camp. She has spent 12 years as s microelectronics process engineer. Seems a dead end job and can’t break the $100k mark. Hopefully it will be worth it.
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Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job
121–130 of 224 posts
Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job
#122Recruiter 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.
And for every company which wants to have a DBA there are thousands which just don't care, or claim having a DBA is just too expensive as the programmers are enough. The results are quite terrible then... but almost nobody cares. Just my small remark after long time of looking for a job as a postgres DBA :).
Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of the skills necessary to succeed in data science, the ability to program is actually the least important. Perhaps you were over-emphasising your software skills at the expense of really demonstrating proper understanding of the science of data analysis. A data science position is not going to require your experience in low-level game programming, for example. In fact, being able to program at all is secondary, sinc…
This right here is a perfect example of why this position is gatekeeped so much. Having a PhD doesn’t automatically mean you think like a scientist of a mathematician, and having a bachelor’s degree and 15 years of experience writing code and then putting in the effort to read Elements of Statistical Learning, compeleting several online courses in machine learning and data science, studying probability, combinatorics…
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Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
This right here is a perfect example of why this position is gatekeeped so much. Having a PhD doesn’t automatically mean you think like a scientist of a mathematician, and having a bachelor’s degree and 15 years of experience writing code and then putting in the effort to read Elements of Statistical Learning, compeleting several online courses in machine learning and data science, studying probability, combinatorics…
I think you are seriously underestimating the value of first hand experience conducting scientific research. It beats into you a mindset you can't get anywhere else. There are no books or manuals or docs to read and master it. There's only the scientific method. You start with a question, conduct experiments, analyze results, adjust your hypothesis, and repeat the process. You get very comfortable with saying "I don'…
> You start with a question, conduct experiments, analyze results, adjust your hypothesis, and repeat the process.
This is missing my pet step: doing the literature review.
I’m pretty ambidextrous when it comes to Python and R, so I’m not typically a combatant in the data science language flamewars.
But... for as much as the Python community likes to assert their superior coding chops, I’ve observed that the R community does a much better job of reading about prior art.
Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of the skills necessary to succeed in data science, the ability to program is actually the least important. Perhaps you were over-emphasising your software skills at the expense of really demonstrating proper understanding of the science of data analysis. A data science position is not going to require your experience in low-level game programming, for example. In fact, being able to program at all is secondary, sinc…
Judging from the replication crisis in many fields, maybe getting a PhD doesn't teach the scientific mindset as much as we'd hoped.
It seems to me since we don’t yet know the truth around large swaths of reality (dark matter and such topics), a replication crisis is exactly what we should expect
You have to eliminate a lot of possibilities in a universe with this much detail
The real issue, again IMO, is more of an “expectation crisis”. We expected to repeat this and failed to. Because we’re still a ridiculously ignorant species lacking conscious awareness of many aspects of reality
Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of the skills necessary to succeed in data science, the ability to program is actually the least important. Perhaps you were over-emphasising your software skills at the expense of really demonstrating proper understanding of the science of data analysis. A data science position is not going to require your experience in low-level game programming, for example. In fact, being able to program at all is secondary, sinc…
This right here is a perfect example of why this position is gatekeeped so much. Having a PhD doesn’t automatically mean you think like a scientist of a mathematician, and having a bachelor’s degree and 15 years of experience writing code and then putting in the effort to read Elements of Statistical Learning, compeleting several online courses in machine learning and data science, studying probability, combinatorics…
I feel you bro. I've been there and done that. The thing is is that they are completely happy losing out on seeing the few candidates that are mixed in among the whole pool of non-PhDs (who are 85%+ posers) when they can select among the PhDs (who are 85%+ legit). It's a simple risk aversion tactic among companies and has nada to do with you personally. Like the man says, "nothin' personal, it's just business".
Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many data scientists really do theoretical investigation? From what I see not too many. It feels a little like looking only for devs who can write complete operating systems and then having them write CRUD apps.
90% of data science time is spent sourcing and then cleaning the data. 10% is spent preparing and delivering reports to stakeholders. The ML time is a rounding error. The job in which you are magically given a pristine dataset and can just tweak ML models all day doesn’t exist.
This 1000 times. I work in data warehousing and Business Intelligence. The closest I have gotten to data scientists are actuaries. Most who don't have a clue about data management, the process to get your data to be consistent and clean so you can do your analysis. Instead of creating standardised processes and tables, each analysis is started from scratch leading to maintenance nightmare and inability to cross-reference the results with any other data sets.
Whoever is running data scientist units needs to realise you need IT/DBA/programming people in the mix. Statisticians in my experience cannot design databases, concepts of code reuse and normalisation do not exist in their vocabulary. A great deal of time is wasted doing repetitive tasks that someone with a programming background would have assisted.
Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job
#128I 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…
When my company posted a data science job we received something like 300 applications on the first day. When looking at them most were people with no experience but a fresh degree or bootcamp grad plus all the other people like you who want to change careers from software with portfolios of data science projects. The field is absolutely saturated with people who want to be a data scientist but have no experience. Thi…
The field is absolutely saturated with people who want to be a data scientist but have no experience. This is where some of that gate keeping comes from.
What are the data science "gotchas?" A lot of people can pick up basic programming in a weekend, but they wouldn't necessarily know what they don't know and might well get deeply mired in problems with concurrency or algorithmic complexity.
It's such "gotchas" which justify gatekeeping. Otherwise, gatekeeping is just unproductive manipulation of the market.
Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job
#129I 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…
If your job applications emphasize the same material as this comment, it's no wonder you aren't getting callbacks. You say you've got a wide range of programming experience. Great, that's usually evidence of intelligence. You say you've done AI in some fashion. Also good.
Then you go off on a jag about how simple the math is and how easy to implement the algorithms are. Totally true, but this isn't what data scientists are paid for. Data science/machine learning positions are more about understanding the limitations and pathologies of the algorithms, the data, and their interactions. This isn't necessarily hard, but it can be -- and the pay tends to scale in proportion to the difficulty. Since theory doesn't provide much guidance -- you can learn everything that anyone knows in a year -- employers will necessarily prefer someone who can demonstrate practical experience with data. Selecting for PhDs is one way of filtering for that.
If you've got experience with data, emphasize that and you should get callbacks.
Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job
#130I 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…
If your job applications emphasize the same material as this comment, it's no wonder you aren't getting callbacks. You say you've got a wide range of programming experience. Great, that's usually evidence of intelligence. You say you've done AI in some fashion. Also good. Then you go off on a jag about how simple the math is and how easy to implement the algorithms are. Totally true, but this isn't what data scientis…
This is spot on. As a hiring manager for these type of positions, the primary thing I look for is a track record of using data to achieve business results. This of course creates a barrier for entering this field and makes those with this experience even more highly sought after.