This is total BS.
> Does the interesting 1970s “programmer” job still exist?
Sure! Go right there: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/cobol-jobs/
And enjoy the not-bloated-at-all systems you'll find there!
Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
111–120 of 246 posts
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#112Everyone is a programmer now. Data scientists, accountants, marketers, doctors, lawyers, project managers. Knowing how to write programs is just know how to write.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that R has such buy-in despite being a rather awful programming language (a friend of mine worked on the next Lisp-like version of R under Ross Ihaka, and the next version is based on the fact that current R is a bit awful) is precisely because it offers such convenience to non-programmers. In my sister company, they have data scientists, and data engineers. The data scientists write their algorithms in the…
Can you elaborate more on the "algorithms in JS" bit? What libraries/tools are they using? Why JS versus Python or JVM languages?
I have no idea why they use JS - it's a Berlin start-up so maybe trendiness is involved? All I know is that their data engineers have to make those algorithms work in production.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seconded. "Data scientists" and "being most comfortable writing in JS" just sounds strange to me.
I don't want to pile on but that sentence strongly reminded me of the oldish saw about "a data scientist is a programmer who lives in SF". I've never heard of anyone using JS for data science. What might it have that's anywhere comparable to the tidyverse or numpy/scipy/sklearn?
They don't use JS to investigate the data, they use SQL (Hive, Impala etc.) as their lingua franca for exploring datasets. But they then write their algorithms based on that analysis in JS.
Again, I don't know why, it struck me as odd also, but hey, whatever they're doing, it works for them.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#115Something about this article strikes me as a thinly-veiled complaint about poorly designed object-oriented systems. Take, for example this comment by the author: >Even if the money were half of what today’s coder gets paid it might still be a better job because one is spared the tedium of looking at millions of lines of Java that do almost nothing! What all those millions of lines of code are is abstractions, decoupl…
nit: is it "about poorly-designed, object-oriented systems"?
no.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#116This post states that a data scientist uses compact languages such as SQL and R. Genuine question - do people really believe that being able to write and understand complex SQL makes you a data scientist? I ask because, I've been writing some of the nastiest, most difficult looking SQL around for probably at least 15 years. And yet, I would NOT call myself a data scientist because I know and can work with data and us…
Your second sentence does not follow from your first. Just because Y's do X, doesn't mean everyone who does X is a Y.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#117Something about this article strikes me as a thinly-veiled complaint about poorly designed object-oriented systems. Take, for example this comment by the author: >Even if the money were half of what today’s coder gets paid it might still be a better job because one is spared the tedium of looking at millions of lines of Java that do almost nothing! What all those millions of lines of code are is abstractions, decoupl…
It would be far from the first HN article (or comment) that failed to make a distinction between "poorly designed object-oriented systems" and the very idea of OOP, design patterns, etc
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#118There was a sign on the door to the Vax Lab at the University of Maryland that said "Department of Research Simulation".
Haha, it seems that quite a few scientists in academia are simulating the act of performing research ;)
In my case, staying up all night playing SimCity in the computer lab was actually good preparation for a career in simulation game programming.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-...
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#119I would say "data engineer" is the new programmer, in that programming is evolving away from procedural monolithic threaded code with locks everywhere, to distributed message processing pipelines whose capacity can be flexibly adjusted, etc. "Data scientist" is an actual role at some companies but most data scientists are actually struggling with the contradiction between what they learned in school and the harsh reality of what their job demands of them.
Edit: misspelling.
Re: Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?
#120only if "software engineer" is the new "system administrator"
This doesn't make any sense. My job title is "software engineer" I never do any system administration. I produce code in python, javascript, C and SQL; never do any sort of administration. Sure, I occasionally deal with linux since our servers are linux and so some knowledge of it is useful, and I use unix tools pretty extensively (in OSX) since I prefer to write code this way. All the "software engineer"s I know hav…
I agree that it doesn't make any sense, however I recently interviewed at two different companies for a software engineering role and both had requirements/expectations for sys admin experience. I will refrain from going off on a rant and just remain hopeful this is yet another short-lived trend.