Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
141–150 of 246 posts
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#142Data scientist, programmer and software engineer are different things. They are not disjoint by any means, but this guy is conflating them in a way that's totally wrong. Software engineers have to engineer things . They deal with production applications, distributed systems, concurrency, build systems, microservices... coding is sometimes only a small part of the job. Data scientists nowadays do programming in intere…
I agree with you. I've seen brilliant Data scientists struggling to understand how git branching works. But, as you say, their principal focus is applied statistics, not programming.
My role as a software engineer is to create a good enough architecture so their can use properly the information contained in their 60 GB CSVs.
As a side note, I also noticed that clients have no issue paying a lot for _Data Science_, but for the "software guys" ? That's a whole other story, despite being of equal importance to the project.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#143Forgot who said it but it was great: a "Data scientist" is a programmer better at stats than any 'normal' programmer and better at programming than any 'normal' statistician." :P
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#144I wonder why "data engineer" isn't one of the suggested terms. Scientists do not really program science, nor do programmers research programs, as their respective fields of expertise.
My current job title is "Data Engineer", before this role I was a "Process Engineer". In my opinion those two jobs are actually pretty similar. When I was working in process engineering I was trying to optimize the outputs from our industrial process on a day to day basis in this role broadly speaking I try to optimize the data extracted from the same industrial process. Mostly I'm concerned with how can we extract d…
What I would consider the difference between an engineer and not engineer (I am not an engineer) is delivering a qos or sla driven by measurement of tolerances and either empirical or imputed information from existing qos or tolerance information... Not necessarily the optimization part. Everyone does optimization to some degree (possibly negative) but not everyone is an engineer.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#145The take down on abstraction and software engineers (by using Java as an example) is similar to saying "back in the day to find a prime number we would simply use a sieve, but today it is a tedium, what with all the pi's and e's and thetas that get in the way, and what are geometry and polynomials doing here, and what in the god's name is this i , I just want to count the prime numbers which are nice round whole numb…
I have never seen someone with “a 3 week mooc” getting a data science job. In fact, those jobs are being gatekeeped to a ridiculous degree, suddenly asking for PhDs for jobs that are barely more than a regular BI job.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In Python 0.1 + 0.2 is not equal to 0.3 because the result is 0.30000000000000004. In R 0.1 + 0.2 is equal to 0.3.
Try this:
> print(.1+.2, digits=18) [1] 0.300000000000000044
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#147What I took from the post was not that a "data scientist" qualifies as a "programmer" in the modern sense, but in the sense of the kinds of things programmers did in the 1970s. And maybe he's expressing some nostalgia for those times. I learned programming around 1982. I didn't pursue a programming career, but went to college and majored in math and physics. Today I often use programming in the way that a data scient…
Yes, "data scientist" is the new "70's programmer"... write some code in one file that runs within a hosting system (mainframe, spark). Regarding the complexity and tedium of many production code bases I think they got there because many developers don't have the ability (experience) or opportunity (iterations) to do things simply.
True, but the reverse is also applicable: academia most often than not does not get the chance to do anything really complex in a tight schedule; this explains what the author says:
"Consider that the “data scientist” uses compact languages such as SQL and R. An entire interesting application may fit in one file. "
I have seen horrendous, multi-page SQL queries in very large systems.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#148The take down on abstraction and software engineers (by using Java as an example) is similar to saying "back in the day to find a prime number we would simply use a sieve, but today it is a tedium, what with all the pi's and e's and thetas that get in the way, and what are geometry and polynomials doing here, and what in the god's name is this i , I just want to count the prime numbers which are nice round whole numb…
I have never seen someone with “a 3 week mooc” getting a data science job. In fact, those jobs are being gatekeeped to a ridiculous degree, suddenly asking for PhDs for jobs that are barely more than a regular BI job.
A skilled software engineer who is good at math could probably take some MOOCs, build a portfolio, and do well at data science interviews that emphasize coding. Many interviews often just ask ISL-level questions (Introduction to Statistical Learning), which is studyable over a few months. On the other hand, it would be significantly more difficult for a new-to-coding statistician to become an excellent coder in a short time ... although I've seen some people do it.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#149I would bet a lot of money on the fact that that isn't the case. (In fact, I am betting a lot of money, in the shape of my choice of career.)
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#150I thought data scientist was closer to doing the work of a statistician than a progrrammer. Visualizing data, and analyzing data. Programming becomes part of it by necessity.
Data science is also a much sexier term than statistics, just like "Machine learning" and "Artificiall intelligence" is a lot sexier than, say, "Regression".
As someone funnier than me put it: "A data scientist is just a statistician with a mac".