Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job • Hacker News Board

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#141

Post by reureu » Fri, May 18, 2018, 6:20 PM UTC

kitanata wrote: post #41

I recently quit a gig and spent a few months looking for a data science/machine learning gig. I was surprised just how gatekeeped these positions were. Everyone wanted a PhD or a masters degree. I have 15 years of experience in software. I’ve done everything to low level game programming and graphics programming to web development, to AI (but not as a specific position title). The gatekeeping in this field surprised…

In my experience working as a data scientist in the health tech field for the past decade (as an "epidemiologist" and "health informaticist" before "data scientist" was a title), I've found folks who just pick up data science from an engineering background often have a simplistic view of working with data generated from human subjects.

My training heavily stressed bias and confounding, study design, problem specification, validation, and interpretation of results. I've seen a lot of software engineers dabbling in machine learning jump to training a deep learning model for a problem where regex would suffice. I've also seen multiple people build models that reflect the data collection instead of the biologic/medical process, and present it without even realizing how wrong their results are. The problems in these cases is often their "objective" measures of performance (e.g., precision, recall, accuracy, AUC, whatever) look pretty good, but they don't see that it's because the model AND data are both heavily influenced by this larger problem. For example, is an increase in complexity of a particular disease due to people actually being sicker or because some payer changed a reimbursement program so now billing departments are using higher acuity diagnosis codes for their patients?

That said, the best engineer I've ever met didn't have a college education. I know a bunch of awesome data scientists who have taken pretty circuitous journeys to their current career. So, "PhD required" seems like it'll lead to a lot of false negatives. So, acknowledging that, my main point is that doing data science in a meaningful and ethical way—particularly when it involves human subjects—requires a lot more thought than just being able to implement some machine learning algorithm.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#142

Post by kitanata » Fri, May 18, 2018, 6:28 PM UTC

reureu wrote: post #141

kitanata wrote: post #41

I recently quit a gig and spent a few months looking for a data science/machine learning gig. I was surprised just how gatekeeped these positions were. Everyone wanted a PhD or a masters degree. I have 15 years of experience in software. I’ve done everything to low level game programming and graphics programming to web development, to AI (but not as a specific position title). The gatekeeping in this field surprised…

In my experience working as a data scientist in the health tech field for the past decade (as an "epidemiologist" and "health informaticist" before "data scientist" was a title), I've found folks who just pick up data science from an engineering background often have a simplistic view of working with data generated from human subjects. My training heavily stressed bias and confounding, study design, problem specifica…

Thank you for this. I couldn’t agree with you more. I see the exact same kind of risk aversion hiring with data scientists that I’ve seen in the past with engineers hiring other people without a specific engineering background because of the assumption that those people don’t have the right mindset or skills. My entire point is that this kind of hiring process weeds out potentially great candidates based on the false assumption that not having a PhD or some other hard to get qualification somehow makes you unqualified. I think this is the result of this “field” being relatively young in industry and it will change as it gets demystified over the next few years.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#143

Post by stcredzero » Fri, May 18, 2018, 6:30 PM UTC

Puer wrote: post #134

stcredzero wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The field is absolutely saturated with people who want to be a data scientist but have no experience. This is where some of that gate keeping comes from. What are the data science "gotchas?" A lot of people can pick up basic programming in a weekend, but they wouldn't necessarily know what they don't know and might well get deeply mired in problems with concurrency or algorithmic complexity. It's such "gotchas" which…

I mean, in my graduate ML classes the first "homework" assignment was always just a problem set of probability and distribution questions. They were simple questions, but you'd be surprised how many people dropped the class after that first assignment. There are a lot of people out there who have memorized how to implement k-means and PCA but would absolutely struggle to understand what they're actually doing or inte…

That's why PhDs are favored because with their experience having to write grants to get funding for their research they're exactly the type of people that can take a naive problem, work it to a result, and then sit in front of a board room of non-technical people and explain why their result was worth the money that was given to them.

My wife has a PhD in comparative lit, but she now works in banking. Her PhD gave her a superpower: Reading. She can quickly absorb large amounts of text with abstruse, complex, and subtle distinctions and tell you very nitpicky things about it. She thinks financial/banking regulations are light reading in comparison to the stuff she waded through to get her PhD. (It's also quite surprising: the number of C-level people in banking who have little patience for reading. She's won a number of boardroom battles because she has actually read things.)

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#144

Post by ellisv » Fri, May 18, 2018, 6:33 PM UTC

kitanata wrote: post #41

I recently quit a gig and spent a few months looking for a data science/machine learning gig. I was surprised just how gatekeeped these positions were. Everyone wanted a PhD or a masters degree. I have 15 years of experience in software. I’ve done everything to low level game programming and graphics programming to web development, to AI (but not as a specific position title). The gatekeeping in this field surprised…

You might be a great candidate but how would anyone know? Something on your application needs to stand out. If you don't have a degree that's fine but recruiters need some way to filter through resumes. I'm generally not a fan of cover letters but write one and make a case if you have one.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#145

Post by kitanata » Fri, May 18, 2018, 6:35 PM UTC

ska wrote: post #133

kitanata wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This right here is a perfect example of why this position is gatekeeped so much. Having a PhD doesn’t automatically mean you think like a scientist of a mathematician, and having a bachelor’s degree and 15 years of experience writing code and then putting in the effort to read Elements of Statistical Learning, compeleting several online courses in machine learning and data science, studying probability, combinatorics…

You are input to a classification routine. The job of those designing the routine is to reduce the false positive rate to as close to 0 as they can without incurring too high a false negative rate. So this sucks if you don't fit the model well in a way that has you often end up as a false negative - but that doesn't' mean the model is broken.

No. The model has a problem with overfitting. That’s my point.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#146

Post by haskellandchill » Fri, May 18, 2018, 6:36 PM UTC

kitanata wrote: post #87

hellofunk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of the skills necessary to succeed in data science, the ability to program is actually the least important. Perhaps you were over-emphasising your software skills at the expense of really demonstrating proper understanding of the science of data analysis. A data science position is not going to require your experience in low-level game programming, for example. In fact, being able to program at all is secondary, sinc…

This right here is a perfect example of why this position is gatekeeped so much. Having a PhD doesn’t automatically mean you think like a scientist of a mathematician, and having a bachelor’s degree and 15 years of experience writing code and then putting in the effort to read Elements of Statistical Learning, compeleting several online courses in machine learning and data science, studying probability, combinatorics…

If you're in NYC, Chicago, or Boston we'll give you a shot! Email me sandy.vanderbleek@publicismedia.com. Thanks.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#147

Post by haskellandchill » Fri, May 18, 2018, 6:40 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #48

kitanata wrote: post #41

I recently quit a gig and spent a few months looking for a data science/machine learning gig. I was surprised just how gatekeeped these positions were. Everyone wanted a PhD or a masters degree. I have 15 years of experience in software. I’ve done everything to low level game programming and graphics programming to web development, to AI (but not as a specific position title). The gatekeeping in this field surprised…

I had the same experience in my last job search. I only did a bachelors. Even with many projects on my resume that were completely data science focused, my response rate was almost zero for those types of positions. My response rate was very good otherwise. It's frustrating. Based on my conversations at data science/analytics meetups, my knowledge is greater than that of the average employed data scientist. My sugges…

Hi, if you're still looking for a data science role and are based in NYC get in touch. sandy.vanderbleek@publicismedia.com Thanks.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#148

Post by imh » Fri, May 18, 2018, 6:41 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #128

resolaibohp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When my company posted a data science job we received something like 300 applications on the first day. When looking at them most were people with no experience but a fresh degree or bootcamp grad plus all the other people like you who want to change careers from software with portfolios of data science projects. The field is absolutely saturated with people who want to be a data scientist but have no experience. Thi…

The field is absolutely saturated with people who want to be a data scientist but have no experience. This is where some of that gate keeping comes from. What are the data science "gotchas?" A lot of people can pick up basic programming in a weekend, but they wouldn't necessarily know what they don't know and might well get deeply mired in problems with concurrency or algorithmic complexity. It's such "gotchas" which…

There are largely three branches of data science jobs, each with their own typical gotchas.

1) Data engineering. I suck at this, don't ask me.

2) Inference. One big gotcha is often of the form of not accounting for all the sources of variation in your estimator and thinking you have something when you don't (often coming from unaccounted sources of correlation in time or space or repeated measures). Another is that correlation isn't causation. This pops up in surprising ways. Or things not being as independent as you thought.

3) Prediction/classification. Gotchas take as many forms as the things you look at, but the birds eye view is that you apply a method and it works ok, but either not well enough, or you then try it in the real world and it doesn't generalize as well as it did on your test set. The ways models break down depend heavily on the model and the data, so the way to diagnose and fix the issue depends on both understanding your toolkit really well and understanding the context of the data (business logic, etc). Another gotcha is in understanding uncertainties of your predictions. If I predict that this word is a noun, how sure am I of that? Many beginners skip those kinds of questions, but don't realize it.

I'm a data scientist with (barely) a bachelor's in physics working with mostly PhD's and, while the academic degree based gatekeeping is bad and frustrates the shit out of me, I get why it's there. The learning investment to learn the basics is dwarfed by the learning investment to be able to flexibly apply the right things at the right times and tweak/fix them as appropriate.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#149

Post by wuliwong » Fri, May 18, 2018, 6:46 PM UTC

I've had a surprising experience with hiring data scientists in the last year. I have hired two (one full-time and one part-time) and am in the process of hiring a third. During this time I have also been looking for a SugarCRM or SuiteCRM developer.

I have been flooded with candidates for the data science position. There seems to be a glut of well qualified [1] data scientist applicants. I have turned down many candidates who I think would also have done well in the position. The CRM developer position has been extremely difficult to fill. This has had the effect of bringing the salary of those two positions in our company to near equivalence. My initial expectations for the salaries were that the data scientist would be paid substantially more than the CRM developer. I know that Sugar/SuiteCRM aren't super popular but it also could be that I have been effected by all the attention that ML and AI have gotten over recent years.

[1] well qualified for us has generally meant masters level or above with real work experience. maybe this definition is the source of the 'glut' of applicants?

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#150

Post by vkou » Fri, May 18, 2018, 6:55 PM UTC

JamesBarney wrote: post #99

hellofunk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of the skills necessary to succeed in data science, the ability to program is actually the least important. Perhaps you were over-emphasising your software skills at the expense of really demonstrating proper understanding of the science of data analysis. A data science position is not going to require your experience in low-level game programming, for example. In fact, being able to program at all is secondary, sinc…

Judging from the replication crisis in many fields, maybe getting a PhD doesn't teach the scientific mindset as much as we'd hoped.

When a man's salary depends on him doing his job poorly, is it really all that surprising that he will cut corners?

If you don't reward (By issuing grants for) negative results, or null results, or replicating prior studies, why do you expect that scientists will aim for any of those outcomes?