11–20 of 24 posts
Strong agree
Managers who haven't been through this process once will hire a smart stats person who can't operate without a full-time engineer pulling production data.
Which can be crippling for small teams. The alternative is to make your PM do their own data work or promote a product-minded engineer into this role.
Earlier 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.
If not, say that his research is conducted in excel, I'd still rather have the former.
Having 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 cod…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think the point is that the person with academic research experience dealing with messier social sciencey economic data would/should have basic junior SDE level programming skill. If not, say that his research is conducted in excel, I'd still rather have the former.
Having 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 b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cod…
What's a concrete example of production DS code? Does it mean that the code handles edge cases, uses logs, is well documented, etc or what exactly? I'm a DS student and don't know what everyone means by "production" code.
tbh i dont think this is something you learn in school, or is expected of new grads
> you might find that you are not looking for a Data Scientist at all, perhaps you are in fact looking for a Data Engineer or a Data Ops person Strong agree Managers who haven't been through this process once will hire a smart stats person who can't operate without a full-time engineer pulling production data. Which can be crippling for small teams. The alternative is to make your PM do their own data work or promote…
Earlier 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.
First, the data is very unbalanced.
Second, you would need to retrain the model often. So you would need to understand statistical methods for comparing text level/word level distributions. This is not a college-level stat.
Third, you would need deep knowledge in NLP, feature engineering and algorithm selection.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cod…
What's a concrete example of production DS code? Does it mean that the code handles edge cases, uses logs, is well documented, etc or what exactly? I'm a DS student and don't know what everyone means by "production" code.
I'm not talking about code to visualize data and present in some form of media. They are part of DS for sure but more for BI and analysts.
For instance, in my previous experience with data science we've built production pipeline to ingest, digest, create model, serve model on some API. The model updates itself every so often, all without human intervention. Code powering something living in production like that would be production DS code imo.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that the person with academic research experience dealing with messier social sciencey economic data would/should have basic junior SDE level programming skill. If not, say that his research is conducted in excel, I'd still rather have the former.
Yeah. I agree with you, as I have both the academic research skills and the SDE level programming skills as a DS (by only doing a masters I was able to get out of academia earlier and develop some SDE skills instead of writing a dissertation). But every once in a while we hire someone who is in their early 30s and just finished academia, and despite sucking at engineering, can blow everyone away scientifically. I thi…
Unrelated, but since you spoke of this, I just want to tell you whoever came up with this term severely underestimated our teams appetite.