Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
blogs.harvard.edu
Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
1–10 of 246 posts
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#2If it means we now get a term that, at least for a couple of years, filters out all the garbage roles recruiters throw at me then I'm on board with adopting this terminology.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#3Isn't it the new term for report writer?
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#4No. Data scientists exist at the mercy of programmers: without the tooling and the pipes, data science would not be a going concern.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#5coder -> programmer -> developer -> data scientist
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#6No. Data scientists exist at the mercy of programmers: without the tooling and the pipes, data science would not be a going concern.
Hah! At my company a decent proportion of engineers spend their lives scrambling to productionalize and operate the Lovecraftian concoctions of R and Python that our data scientists cook up on their laptops.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#7I thought “engineer” is the new “programmer.”
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#8> Consider that the “data scientist” uses compact languages such as SQL and R. An entire interesting application may fit in one file. There is an input, some processing, and an output answer.
The argument this post is making is reductive. Yes, sometimes data science is simple. Sometimes it isn't, and that's when you really need someone with the appropriate skillset.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#9The basic premise of the article is that
systems programming=irrelevant bloat and abstraction
while
data reduction=definite purpose and utility
People writing python notebooks to do data analysis are probably fairly comparable to the scientific computing programmers of the past, but I feel like this picture tends to dismiss the computer science side of systems programming:things like GUIs, network code, processes and virtual memory, all the architectural aspects of computing.
One might prefer APL or Forth for writing one-page programs, and it's probably true that systems now are bloated relative to what they could be. Still, there is much of interest going on in a typical operating system, compiler or video game, while a typical data analysis notebook is IMO fairly dull and even basic, from a software angle.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#10No. Data scientists exist at the mercy of programmers: without the tooling and the pipes, data science would not be a going concern.
Hah! At my company a decent proportion of engineers spend their lives scrambling to productionalize and operate the Lovecraftian concoctions of R and Python that our data scientists cook up on their laptops.
Even the Stanford NLP Java implementations don’t always match the code they’re meant to be a translation of. I think R is a worse offender than Python.