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I'm a Data Scientist and It's Not My Passion

refinery29.com

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Re: I'm a Data Scientist and It's Not My Passion

#121

Post by lame88 »

codingdave wrote: post #106
Sohakes wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not bullshit. But at the same time, I wonder why so many people do these majors. They mostly end up working on a unrelated field. If they go to university just because they are passionate about learning the subject and are willing to pay for it, that's great! But I feel it's just that they are pressured to go to college, they are pressured to "follow their passions" even when it will not work out, and in fact so…

Philosophy teaches logic and analysis, and teaches you to break down texts into their core points and arguments, then both support and refute them as well as apply them to other situations. It teaches you to see multiple perspectives, to compare and synthesize them, and use them in practice, whether or not you actually agree with them. Those abilities are needed in the working world, (and not just by lawyers), and ab…

Glad to hear that - I can share my perspective too. Even given my graduate computer science degree, I only apply what I learned in a very shallow way to my work, which has generally been apps of some sort or another, web mobile etc. For example I studied a lot about operating systems that don't even come up in my projects, other than a process vs thread vs coroutine, blocking or nonblocking io. Similarly with algorithms and architecture. Of course, it's easy to shrug off what you already know as supposedly obvious, but I sure as hell never had to implement a complex algorithm and perform asymptotic analysis on it for my CRUD app, and all the concurrency and object-oriented programming stuff I learned has become more obsolete now that we have horizontal/vertical scaling, databases and cache servers handling concurrent state, and a tendency toward trivially parallelized code and event loops. What has really stuck? Discrete mathematics and deductive systems, theory of computation - abstract stuff I could not appreciate at the time and now wish I really tried at. So altogether, I feel that my CS degree helped in the short term, but on the long term, has left me only marginally advantaged over either not having a degree or having an unrelated degree, and still leaves me unsatisfied with my understanding of honestly more fulfilling subjects. And while I can pick up plenty of books and information on the engineering side, I face a much more uphill battle trying to understand concepts in economics, math, and physics, and my comprehension of creative writing, art, and philosophy is still really lackluster.

Re: I'm a Data Scientist and It's Not My Passion

#122

Post by minimaxir »

rm999 wrote: post #119
minimaxir wrote: post #2

Link to original post: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/six-figure-paycheck-data-sc... (Edit: URL fixed) The real question is that $125k as a Senior Data Analyst in NYC seems low. > I have this creative side, which comes in handy when thinking through challenging problems, but there is only so much creativity that I can use when in data analysis. This I disagree with; in data analysis/science, there's more than way t…

>in data analysis/science, there's more than way to highlight/analyze a problem, and more than one way to solve it. In my experience, the best solutions are often the craziest. I strongly disagree. I have hired, mentored, and/or managed 20+ data scientists and analysts over my career; in my experience the ones who come up with "crazy"/creative solutions are often the least effective in the long run. This is especiall…

To clarify, simpler/standard solutions are better, no disagreement there. But real world data is not very polite.

Re: I'm a Data Scientist and It's Not My Passion

#123

Post by jki275 »

scottlocklin wrote: post #97
linuxftw wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot more to life than technical/engineering fields. The pay is just complete crap. If you don't mind being broke and living on welfare, by all means, get that liberal arts degree.

One of the guys running DE Shaw has a psychology degree. One of their early hires had an undergrad degree in English romantic poetry. Pretty sure they're doing OK. IMO most talented/flexible degree per year studied is electrical engineering. Best degree is no degree though. One Vitalek or Bram Cohen is worth 10000 Harvard computer science graduates.

That's like saying don't bother studying so you can get to the NBA.

For the unicorns that can pull that off, sure. For the other 99.9999999999999% of the population of the planet it's really bad advice.

Re: I'm a Data Scientist and It's Not My Passion

#124

Post by lostmsu »

majormajor wrote: post #112
lostmsu wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Without significant advances in STEM the last 200 years would be pretty much identical to the 200 years before them, and another 200 before them, etc.

Did those advances come about because everyone grew up being told to study STEM so they could crunch numbers for marketing analytics all day?

No, I think the thing went haywire after the invention of the printing press, which enabled more people to access STEM, causing them to invent more things.

Re: I'm a Data Scientist and It's Not My Passion

#125

Post by faissaloo »

notbob wrote: post #46
baron816 wrote: post #40

The media's constant reporting on college debt and low paying majors has actually had a large impact on what the next generation is studying. https://qz.com/1370922/the-2008-financial-crisis-completely-... The humanities and social sciences have fallen off a cliff, heath care and STEM has soared. I'm skeptical that this is a good thing.

That QZ article gets a lot wrong. In particular: > if the tech bubble bursts, computer science may even be riskier than a humanities degree, which gives graduates a broader set of knowledge. How do humanities degrees provide "broader knowledge" than CS degrees? Different, sure, but broader? Good CS degrees are not coding bootcamps. CS students take a lot of mathematics and logic-heavy courses and can easily pivot fro…

I less concerned about the tech bubble bursting in and of itself. My concern is that it seems like tech is the last thing people can do to earn themselves a decent living nowadays, if that bubble bursts where does it leave us?

Re: I'm a Data Scientist and It's Not My Passion

#126

Post by faissaloo »

lame88 wrote: post #67
pawelmurias wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less bullshit majors seems like a very good thing.

This is either a low effort bait post or exactly the kind of bullshit tech-worship I've come to despise. There's more to life and learning than STEM and whatever rides the current economic wave.

I don't think it is, I'd say that most uni courses don't give you anything you couldn't get with the internet.

Re: I'm a Data Scientist and It's Not My Passion

#127

Post by notbob »

ianai wrote: post #72
SantalBlush wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

STEM is such a broad category that anyone promoting STEM fields as a solution to the college debt problem is obviously just repeating what they heard from other people. There are a ton of underpaid and overworked people in STEM.

Like grad students or even just anyone not in the C-tier in many places.

Grad students are treated poorly, but the same 2-3 field split in STEM is true there as well.

E.g., CS PhD have plentiful $200K+ job opportunities after graduation and a relatively labor-friendly faculty market. Meanwhile, many mathematics PhDs postdoc into their 40s.

Re: I'm a Data Scientist and It's Not My Passion

#128

Post by notbob »

NotSammyHagar wrote: post #87
momirlan wrote: post #71

You need to ask for a pay rise. $125,000 is nothing these days. A regular developer makes that much.

I thought devs make more than data scientists? It's my experience that devs are in much shorter supply related to the demand, and their (comp or) value is usually higher.

Long story short: both titles are too broad to be useful.

Re: I'm a Data Scientist and It's Not My Passion

#129

Post by luckylion »

lame88 wrote: post #110
Sohakes wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not bullshit. But at the same time, I wonder why so many people do these majors. They mostly end up working on a unrelated field. If they go to university just because they are passionate about learning the subject and are willing to pay for it, that's great! But I feel it's just that they are pressured to go to college, they are pressured to "follow their passions" even when it will not work out, and in fact so…

There is absolutely pressure to go to college, but there is hardly pressure to follow passions. If there was, then the two would be in conflict. The pressure is: don't follow your passions, go to college, major in STEM or "something useful". What has that resulted in? An inflation of watered-down STEM-lite degrees not just from the standard degree factories but accredited state research universities, that provide non…

> Because philosophy heavily emphasizes critical and abstract thinking.

I've taken a few classes in philosophy (it was my major for a while), and I can't tell if this is super different in the US vs Europe or you're just making stuff up, but this is just not what I saw. Yes, logic is part of philosophy, and everybody needs to take that class, but it's not heavily emphasized for the majority of students. Being able to write summaries and essays is, and learning the lingo, and reading (and hopefully understanding, or being able to pretend so well enough) the classics.

> Better yet they might be able to really think about the consequences of the systems they build, whereas the tech industry mostly seems to have no problem and no concerns about building a global surveillance apparatus.

Please don't. Studying in the humanities doesn't make you a better person, and it doesn't make you consider ethics in everything you do either.

> School is the one place where we have an institutionalized system to study and progress the liberal arts as a whole

Except not everybody agrees that is what life is all about, what's best for society, the country, humanity or whatever you choose. Somebody has to do the actual work, you know? Sure, we can all become philosophers and then starve to death, or we can make sure that we have enough people that know how to grow food. When it comes down to it, yeah, with all of my ethics training, I very much prefer people that know how to grow food over people that will explain that the ethical thing to do is to feed them first, because only they can lead progress and advance the liberal arts. But then again, I always had a thing for utilitarianism and was highly suspicious of the bourgeois elitism in intellectual circles.

Re: I'm a Data Scientist and It's Not My Passion

#130

Post by Fomite »

luckylion wrote: post #101
bigred100 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if humanities knowledge will become a status symbol, as being in great shape has become

Hasn't it already? It certainly is in Western Europe, a way to distinguish yourself from the filthy masses that need to do physical labor and the slightly smarter but soulless engineers and lawyers and what have you.

This. There's more than one country where a degree in Classics, for example, is code for "Future Banker".
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