There was a sign on the door to the Vax Lab at the University of Maryland that said "Department of Research Simulation".
Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
21–30 of 246 posts
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#22No. 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.
As a data scientists I view other data scientists who need engineers to productionize their code with contempt. Perhaps (probably?) their data pipelines and systems are sufficiently more complicated than mine, but I'd feel embarrassed if I couldn't write production Python code
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#23No. 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.
hedge fund?
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#24Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#25I thought “engineer” is the new “programmer.”
It's the old new term ;)
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#26There was a sign on the door to the Vax Lab at the University of Maryland that said "Department of Research Simulation".
Hmmm! Funny, but I'll bet you could learn a lot from research simulations. It is, after all, a field that does seem to benefit from the big-picture review...
(I was just talking to a client about this today, at a micro-level: What is your personal research model, for important career-related, yet non-work-related projects? Does it exist, or do you just perform research as the intuition prompts? What kind of structure can be leveraged to achieve a quality outcome? So maybe that's why this seemed interesting to me.)
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#27Data Scientist has two terms in it : Data + Science. More often than not, people ignore the "Science" part of that equation.
Someone said any field with "Science" in the name isn't really a science. Computer science, data science, political science, social science, etc. Physics, chemistry, biology don't have science in their name.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As a data scientists I view other data scientists who need engineers to productionize their code with contempt. Perhaps (probably?) their data pipelines and systems are sufficiently more complicated than mine, but I'd feel embarrassed if I couldn't write production Python code
They are different skills. Not saying that it's hard to learn both, but there are standardized career paths that will lead you to be good at the modeling / techniques side of "data science" without learning much about software engineering. For example, studying math in undergrad. And there are certainly lots of people capable of productionizing messy R scripts without fully understanding the statistical ideas behind them. So I think, as a team leader, you are restricting yourself to some degree if you only hire people who can do both.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#29Data scientist is a misnomer except when there is a relevant Ph.D. and that was never the bar for a programmer.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#30There was a sign on the door to the Vax Lab at the University of Maryland that said "Department of Research Simulation".
Haha, it seems that quite a few scientists in academia are simulating the act of performing research ;)