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Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

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21–30 of 49 posts

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#21

Compensation may be going up, but at top tech companies, software engineers still make significantly more than data scientists for the same level (twice the RSUs). I’ve noticed at non-tech companies, the reverse seems to be true: data scientists make slightly more than software engineers.

That’s why you become a data engineer and get the best of both worlds. If you can market yourself to a company as a “full stack data developer” you will make more money than either category

"data engineer" is often considered a lower prestige title than data scientist. "Data scientist" is a title recently thrown around a lot for positions that used to be called "data analyst", with no strong ML or SWE ability required. Amazon's title for scientists with strong ML engineering ability is called "Applied Scientist" and it's paid significantly higher than SWE

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#23
post #19

Compensation may be going up, but at top tech companies, software engineers still make significantly more than data scientists for the same level (twice the RSUs). I’ve noticed at non-tech companies, the reverse seems to be true: data scientists make slightly more than software engineers.

Does Google even have a "Data Scientist" title? I don't think I've ever come across a JD for one.

Yep, they do. I know several and have been through part of the interview process (I withdrew because Google takes too long, and I went to FB instead of dealing with their bullshit).

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#24

Compensation may be going up, but at top tech companies, software engineers still make significantly more than data scientists for the same level (twice the RSUs). I’ve noticed at non-tech companies, the reverse seems to be true: data scientists make slightly more than software engineers.

That’s why you become a data engineer and get the best of both worlds. If you can market yourself to a company as a “full stack data developer” you will make more money than either category

Data Engineer role is about building big data/streaming pipelines for data and often DevOps aspects of keeping such pipeline deployed and online. A boring, dead-end job. Avoid.

Make yourself both ML/DL master and SWEng and you'll be doing extremely well.

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#25
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why you become a data engineer and get the best of both worlds. If you can market yourself to a company as a “full stack data developer” you will make more money than either category

Data Engineer role is about building big data/streaming pipelines for data and often DevOps aspects of keeping such pipeline deployed and online. A boring, dead-end job. Avoid. Make yourself both ML/DL master and SWEng and you'll be doing extremely well.

I do not find my Data Engineer job either boring or dead end, but thanks for the condescension.

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#26
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data Engineer role is about building big data/streaming pipelines for data and often DevOps aspects of keeping such pipeline deployed and online. A boring, dead-end job. Avoid. Make yourself both ML/DL master and SWEng and you'll be doing extremely well.

I do not find my Data Engineer job either boring or dead end, but thanks for the condescension.

I love data engineering - atleast when I practiced it at an adtech company, it involved lots of interesting challenges around performance, distributed systems and a mix of SWE & Ops work. Buut, applying to data engineering jobs I see where the parent poster is coming from (minus the condescension) - a lot of them are about writing simple ETL jobs, and they tend to be lower paid & less prestigious.

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why you become a data engineer and get the best of both worlds. If you can market yourself to a company as a “full stack data developer” you will make more money than either category

"data engineer" is often considered a lower prestige title than data scientist. "Data scientist" is a title recently thrown around a lot for positions that used to be called "data analyst", with no strong ML or SWE ability required. Amazon's title for scientists with strong ML engineering ability is called "Applied Scientist" and it's paid significantly higher than SWE

You're claiming to know amazon internal except you're also using SWE, not SDE, the standard name for software devs there. Also amazon seems to hire very few Applied Scientists and thus is likely cherry picking for this role. The one I work near is an industry thought leader at Principal Applied Scientist. They'd be a leading researcher if they were in academia.

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#28
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why you become a data engineer and get the best of both worlds. If you can market yourself to a company as a “full stack data developer” you will make more money than either category

Data Engineer role is about building big data/streaming pipelines for data and often DevOps aspects of keeping such pipeline deployed and online. A boring, dead-end job. Avoid. Make yourself both ML/DL master and SWEng and you'll be doing extremely well.

You know that's usually the hard part of ML projects, right? It may be boring, but it also tends to be the less least replaceable component.

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#29
post #18

Might be one of the most overrated jobs, other than product manager.

And software architect

That's a fun job, though.

You can spend your entire tenure explaining to people that just because something starts and serves up a web page, it's not a good idea to run 30 year old software in Production... eventually you get to the point where you can only hire Senior Software Engineers to take care of our software and then it becomes a fucking priority to unfuck your stack because your payroll costs are the most expensive line item.

Yes I'm salty as fuck.

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not find my Data Engineer job either boring or dead end, but thanks for the condescension.

I love data engineering - atleast when I practiced it at an adtech company, it involved lots of interesting challenges around performance, distributed systems and a mix of SWE & Ops work. Buut, applying to data engineering jobs I see where the parent poster is coming from (minus the condescension) - a lot of them are about writing simple ETL jobs, and they tend to be lower paid & less prestigious.

Those certainly exist, but aren’t what I was referring to in my post. The “data engineers” I’ve worked with (and am) are usually distributed systems people who also know a bit of data science. In that case it’s basically a higher “prestige” software engineering role
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