Tips for Hiring a Data Scientist into a Tech Company
blog.infer.systems
Tips for Hiring a Data Scientist into a Tech Company
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Re: Tips for Hiring a Data Scientist into a Tech Company
#2Having worked in data science, my advice would be to hire people who has coding ability.
Who can write working and reviewable code.
Not because statistical knowledge is not important, but because coding skills are often overlooked. I see no role in data science that shouldn’t need at least a junior software engineer level of coding skill.
Re: Tips for Hiring a Data Scientist into a Tech Company
#3Having worked in data science, my advice would be to hire people who has coding ability. Who can write working and reviewable code. Not because statistical knowledge is not important, but because coding skills are often overlooked. I see no role in data science that shouldn’t need at least a junior software engineer level of coding skill.
I agree. Last time I hired a data scientist, we got someone who could code but who'd write very much suboptimal code that worked for his exploration and as a proof of concept, but not much more.
That worked out fine: we paired him with a relatively junior developer that worked with him on translating his proof of concept code into something more suitable for production. I think both of them learned quite a lot of coding and data science respectively from each other, and output was good.
But if our data scientist hadn't been able to produce something that we could run as a starting point, the gap would have been too big.
Re: Tips for Hiring a Data Scientist into a Tech Company
#4Having worked in data science, my advice would be to hire people who has coding ability. Who can write working and reviewable code. Not because statistical knowledge is not important, but because coding skills are often overlooked. I see no role in data science that shouldn’t need at least a junior software engineer level of coding skill.
As a data scientist, I agree with this. On my team, the data scientists with the largest impact seem to be the ones who are sort of hybrid software engineers / data scientists. I’ve noticed these people tend to swap between the two titles occasionally (re-interviewing within the company for one role or the other).
I think if I had my own company I’d create a position like “scientific software engineer”, which would basically be a SWE with a scientific or statistical background. It would de-emphasize pure analysis in favor of directly applied research in the form of production code. There are some similar titles out there (research scientist, ML engineer), but they don’t quite capture exactly what I have in mind. “Applied scientist” would probably be the closest.
Re: Tips for Hiring a Data Scientist into a Tech Company
#5Having worked in data science, my advice would be to hire people who has coding ability. Who can write working and reviewable code. Not because statistical knowledge is not important, but because coding skills are often overlooked. I see no role in data science that shouldn’t need at least a junior software engineer level of coding skill.
the fact is all the knowledge that a data scientist has should already be discoverable by any decent programmer. Basically college level statistics is required to be a data scientist. If your engineer cant handle that I hope they are more frontend than backend.
Data science does have particular algorithms and analysis graphs that are unique to the field but the underlying math is set theory and statistics.
"Data scientist" is a fancy title for "smart math guy". But math without application gets you no where. You need someone to put it into the machine.
Re: Tips for Hiring a Data Scientist into a Tech Company
#6This thinly veiled advertisement gives me almost no confidence that the posting firm has ever met a data scientist much less possesses expertise in how to effectively recruit and build a function for them at a small tech company.
The first things to understand is if you are hiring for a DS role to support product development/understanding, growth or marketing, advanced BI, core product features (eg ML in your offering) etc. What VP your DS would report to in a 500 person version of your org chart makes a huuuge difference in understanding what skills and aptitudes you are looking for.
Design the position and responsibilities now and in 2 yrs for the ideal candidate, then design your hiring strategy.
Re: Tips for Hiring a Data Scientist into a Tech Company
#7Another idiotic marketing article. Please don’t trust these trash article.
Re: Tips for Hiring a Data Scientist into a Tech Company
#8Having worked in data science, my advice would be to hire people who has coding ability. Who can write working and reviewable code. Not because statistical knowledge is not important, but because coding skills are often overlooked. I see no role in data science that shouldn’t need at least a junior software engineer level of coding skill.
the fact is all the knowledge that a data scientist has should already be discoverable by any decent programmer. Basically college level statistics is required to be a data scientist. If your engineer cant handle that I hope they are more frontend than backend. Data science does have particular algorithms and analysis graphs that are unique to the field but the underlying math is set theory and statistics. "Data scie…
Depends. If it’s a spam classifier, yeah I agree. If it’s estimating causal models for some type of economic analysis it will be harder for a self taught SDE to compete with someone with academic research experience dealing with messier social sciencey economic data.
Re: Tips for Hiring a Data Scientist into a Tech Company
#9I feel like pursuing Data Science as a career is such a career trap.
Most companies vary wildly in expectation for these roles. You might be asked to spend most of time data engineering (like making ETL pipelines in one), or build a bunch of basic ML models , or spend all your time doing SQL queries and building dashboards in another.
It’s silly and would never recommend anyone pursue that path as a lifelong career. Learn to code if you don’t know already, and just go into a software role that is data or ML focused.
Re: Tips for Hiring a Data Scientist into a Tech Company
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
the fact is all the knowledge that a data scientist has should already be discoverable by any decent programmer. Basically college level statistics is required to be a data scientist. If your engineer cant handle that I hope they are more frontend than backend. Data science does have particular algorithms and analysis graphs that are unique to the field but the underlying math is set theory and statistics. "Data scie…
Depends. If it’s a spam classifier, yeah I agree. If it’s estimating causal models for some type of economic analysis it will be harder for a self taught SDE to compete with someone with academic research experience dealing with messier social sciencey economic data.
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