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Ask HN: I realise data science is not for me and feel depressed

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Re: Ask HN: I realise data science is not for me and feel depressed

#21

Post by k8sToGo »

ghoshbishakh wrote: post #17
saalweachter wrote: post #8

Firstly, finish your degree. For most employers, just checking off the degree is more important than exactly what it is. This is especially true for software engineering. You will have many, many coworkers who have degrees in physics or bioinformatics or mathematics and work as SWEs. Most of their stories will be exactly the same as yours, although "...but there weren't any good paying jobs so..." will be in the runn…

You think degree is important? I am trying to finish my PhD. But I don't want to stay in academia after I finish. Would my degree be helpful in getting any SWE jobs?

Depends on where you are. I think in Europe it is more important than in the US.

But I see anything above Bachelors as a personal preference (with a few exceptions). If you want to finish PhD, then go for it.

Re: Ask HN: I realise data science is not for me and feel depressed

#23

Post by notslow »

ghoshbishakh wrote: post #17
saalweachter wrote: post #8

Firstly, finish your degree. For most employers, just checking off the degree is more important than exactly what it is. This is especially true for software engineering. You will have many, many coworkers who have degrees in physics or bioinformatics or mathematics and work as SWEs. Most of their stories will be exactly the same as yours, although "...but there weren't any good paying jobs so..." will be in the runn…

You think degree is important? I am trying to finish my PhD. But I don't want to stay in academia after I finish. Would my degree be helpful in getting any SWE jobs?

I have a Ph.D. and am not in academia. The higher degree opens up opportunities for challenging positions, but you will probably need to show basic SWE capabilities also

Re: Ask HN: I realise data science is not for me and feel depressed

#24

Post by fortytwo79 »

saalweachter wrote: post #8

Firstly, finish your degree. For most employers, just checking off the degree is more important than exactly what it is. This is especially true for software engineering. You will have many, many coworkers who have degrees in physics or bioinformatics or mathematics and work as SWEs. Most of their stories will be exactly the same as yours, although "...but there weren't any good paying jobs so..." will be in the runn…

Agreed. Speaking as someone who has hired hundreds of software engineers, I can tell you that having a degree at all tells me a lot about your work ethic. Sure, I'd prefer a comp sci background, but your degree is nearly as good. It's an indicator of how you think.

You know what other degree I see a LOT of in SWE? Music. I've hired countless music majors.

Re: Ask HN: I realise data science is not for me and feel depressed

#26

Post by parasense »

The work may sometimes involves SQL, and that's very good knowledge. You can get lost in optimizing the queries, and it can even become it's own line of work. We used to call them DataBase Administrators, and I guess the job may still exist somewhere. However, you should be careful a lot of places in the industry are actually hiring for a position called Data Analyst which is sometimes confused for Data Scientist, or the reverse where an analyst is hired for DS role...

Finish your degree, obviously... you can pivot to other jobs if you like, but once you find a real DS role it may improve.

Re: Ask HN: I realise data science is not for me and feel depressed

#27

Post by junon »

ghoshbishakh wrote: post #17
saalweachter wrote: post #8

Firstly, finish your degree. For most employers, just checking off the degree is more important than exactly what it is. This is especially true for software engineering. You will have many, many coworkers who have degrees in physics or bioinformatics or mathematics and work as SWEs. Most of their stories will be exactly the same as yours, although "...but there weren't any good paying jobs so..." will be in the runn…

You think degree is important? I am trying to finish my PhD. But I don't want to stay in academia after I finish. Would my degree be helpful in getting any SWE jobs?

Yes.

Re: Ask HN: I realise data science is not for me and feel depressed

#28

Post by pech0rin »

Switching from DS to SWE will not be very hard for you I dont think. Additionally having the DS background can make you extra marketable, especially for smaller companies where a broader skillset is more valuable. If you wanna get some skills with SWE, I would build & deploy some project. Dont worry about the business side but building a rails or nodejs project from scratch and figuring out deployments etc will give you a lot of answers to interview questions.

Re: Ask HN: I realise data science is not for me and feel depressed

#29

Post by randomstate »

First, as everyone here said: finish your degree, it will surely help with relocation and job search.

I have a very similar experience to yours (didn't like the analytics side of Data Science) and my advice would be to look into ML engineering roles. ML engineering is heavily SWE-oriented, sort of an intersection between Data Science and Software Engineering. I switched to ML engineer and I totally love it, you get to learn tons of cool SWE stuff (Docker, kubernetes, linux, cloud, ci/cd) and you're still close to newest ML research, which I love :)

Re: Ask HN: I realise data science is not for me and feel depressed

#30

Post by vkk8 »

Data science is an oversold profession. When studying it, you learn really cool things; Bayesian models, reinforcement learning, AI, all the trendy stuff. In reality, most of the data scientists end up spending almost all of their time interacting with horribly designed, decade(s) old databases and the analysis part of their job is mostly just plotting the mean as a function of time and doing logistic regression over and over again.
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