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Ask HN: Was data science just hype?

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31–40 of 81 posts

Re: Ask HN: Was data science just hype?

#31
post #2

I work for one of the major bootcamps and I can tell you that interest has significantly declined over the past 1 year. The market for data science has indeed shrunk. The reason? I'm not sure, could be that it didn't live up to the hype.

Has anything changed about the population applying for the bootcamp

Re: Ask HN: Was data science just hype?

#32
post #28

It wasn't 'just' hype, but it was over-hyped. There are companies that have their act together from a data standpoint and can make use of data scientists, whatever that term actually means in the context of their organization, but most can't. So the companies who spun up a data science initiative but had no business doing so are now likely saying things like 'what do you mean we don't have the necessary data?' and 'w…

Usually the companies able to benefit from data science are also the ones best positioned to benefit from digitalization. They have their processes under control. I worried that all the others will just be relegated to ... wherever.

Re: Ask HN: Was data science just hype?

#33
post #2

I work for one of the major bootcamps and I can tell you that interest has significantly declined over the past 1 year. The market for data science has indeed shrunk. The reason? I'm not sure, could be that it didn't live up to the hype.

From my perspective it seems like even 5 years ago data scientists were more about creating and validating ways to look at the data whereas today it is more about processing the data with the standard tools and methodologies. Data processing is as big as ever but takes a fraction of the effort to apply it.

Re: Ask HN: Was data science just hype?

#35
post #19

I think what companies really want is smart generalists with advanced math, programming, and modeling skills coupled with domain knowledge. That skill set will always carry high value in technical companies. The reason it carries value is the skills are difficult to acquire. I think the recent decline in interest reflects the rise of new data science candidates that are taking the path of least resistance to a career…

I am wary when people wax lyrical about all of the ways they love using machine learning on data. It makes me nervous because i worry that they have a hammer and can't wait to use it on anything vaguely nail shaped.

Yep, that's why I make sure to set time aside for toy problems. Creating contrived problems can sometimes scratch that itch to use a certain technology that don't really fit into what I'm doing at work.

Re: Ask HN: Was data science just hype?

#36
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an epistemology / ontology question, as folks familiar with the humanities would spot in little time. Aka it’s not “data” until something empowers the created metric a meaning. The map is not the territory. https://www.amazon.com/Raw-Data-Oxymoron-Infrastructures/dp/...

I know what all those words mean, I've studied critical theory, and I have no idea what your point is.

I think the point is that "data" is useless until it becomes "knowledge," and that turning data into knowledge is a complicated and philosophical act. Business being business, most of the people running the show were never interested in the deeper questions of how to create knowledge. They just wanted a new arrow in the quiver. Once they realized the cost of actually doing the work, it became much less appealing.

Re: Ask HN: Was data science just hype?

#37

Over the past several months I keep seeing people trying to equate data science with machine learning, and it made me wonder if the people doing this are trying to salvage (or perhaps enhance) the investment they made in data science by trying to blur the lines between the two.

Isn't the line between the two indeed blurry? Maybe deep learning is machine learning, but modern statistical methods such as elastic net, SVM, and random forests are things data scientists should know about.

Re: Ask HN: Was data science just hype?

#39

My guess is that data science roles will merge with business analyst roles. Python and r will slowly join excel as tools of choice for making tables and charts to stick in powerpoint slides and pdf reports. Meanwhile the machine learning side of things will be the domain of _something_ engineers with candidates more likely to come from the computer science/math/engineer world rather than the sciences. (Other then tho…

> My guess is that data science roles will merge with business analyst roles.

Data Scientist is a buzz word for Statistician. Business Analyst is buzz word for Industrial Engineer. For example 10 years ago if you studied at my university you would witness that some Statistics students were doing second major mostly at Industrial Engineering and vice versa. They are already related for many years but average Joe has no idea.

Re: Ask HN: Was data science just hype?

#40
post #26
post #14

"AI" (or whatever rebranding it gets) always works in cycles, with a phase of excitement and overpromising followed by a phase of apparent underdelivering and skepticism. But what actually happens is that the innovations just become part of the normal tooling, and stop being called "AI". At some point there is no need to hire a "data scientist", as any python programmer is already expected to know how to use numpy, p…

The value is a "Data Scientist" isn't that they know how to use a tool - it's that tell know why to use _that_ tool (technique) and not this other one.

I'm definitely not denying the worth of the particular skillset, just like of good DBAs. But as with any skillset, there are diminishing returns. You can get fairly easily someone at the point where they can merge data from multiple sources, create automatic reports with graphs, make simple similarity clustering, regressions and expert systems even if in suboptimal ways and most companies don't really need more than that. They can even learn to integrate cloud/black box solutions for image/speech recognition without having any idea of how to write one from scratch.

Of course, if a company wants to truly innovate in the area it will need PhDs or people with great dedicated knowledge in ML/Statistics/Particular Domain, if it needs to scale it will need good data engineers to create the data pipeline together with DBAs and experts in each tools (like Spark/Flink), but for most companies the basic above is already a great improvement to what they had before.

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