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Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

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Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#161

Post by monadmancer »

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…

I think the obvious "gotchas" are problem definition (Am I formulating the problem in a way that will allow me to create value? a concrete example: am I modeling churn correctly?), overfitting, target leaks, and model trouble shooting / improvement (i.e. the model is doing OK, can it do better? How much better? How do we get there? Remembering that small performance gains can mean big $ at scale). On the reporting side, how confident that what I'm reporting is real? This is where the "science" training is helpful. Programming experience is relevant in the sense that implementation is important, i.e. it's far too easy to introduce critical target leak bugs when engineering features.

Of course we can abstract the root argument; for a given job, among those qualified to fill that job, there exists at least one person who has auto-learned the skills required to perform the job. This is probably true.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#162

Post by solomatov »

Mc91 wrote: post #64
ryguytilidie wrote: post #8

Recruiter here. Data Science is one of ~3 roles I generally don't recruit for. Not because Data Scientists are super hard to find, but more because companies seem to all want data scientists and all want them to do completely different things and none of them really understand those things. Makes for a pretty lame hiring experience unfortunately. :(

I know a mid-level manager at a Fortune 100 company. Somewhere up the management chain, someone read an article about how data science is the hot new thing that your company has to be doing or it will have missed the boat. So word was sent down that their next project was to do data science. So now they are launching a data science project to analyze their business data, which this manager is overseeing. They're hiri…

That's normal. The company to experiment with data science and understand what can be done with it on a low risk project.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#164

Post by haskellandchill »

nunya213 wrote: post #98
starpilot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article makes it sound like you can just walk into a DS position. No. Expect a months-long job search if you don't have a PhD.

Maybe but once you are in you have the golden ticket. Source: am a current DS with an MS and like the guy in the article I get contacted by recruiters weekly.

Ha yea I lucked into one 0:) Came from DE side and snuck me in so we can get things done.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#165

Post by ChrisLomont »

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…

>You are not special because you have a PhD and I don’t.

>I can do everything you can do.

To demonstrate that to an employer wanting PhD workers, go get a PhD like the other PhDs did. Claiming you can do what they do when you haven't done what they have done is not going to cut it.

>you won’t even call me to talk to me that means you are missing out, and you are gatekeeping

Gatekeeping = not spending unnecessary money and wasting unnecessary time.

An employer saves significant money and time by not having to interview everyone claiming they can do what PhD can do but didn't bother to get one. Your skilled workers don't have to stop producing and do interviews, your HR people don't need to spend time and money booking flights, hotels, and such for candidates. You don't have to work through 500 resumes with 30 PhDs in the pool - you sift through 30 resumes.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#166

Post by mistrial9 »

at a certain company in San Francisco, they had Data Science meetups very publicly, for a year or more.. very well attended.. The company made an announcement they were 'hiring' at many of them ..

It appears to me that about two or three people were hired that way over more than a year.. at the same time, the company was being sold to a larger company in Seattle.. the founders made at least seven figures in the sale, I would guess... draw your own conclusions..

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#167

Post by hellofunk »

kitanata wrote: post #106
erw1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What value does an advanced degree, in your opinion, bring to a data science position then? To hear you say it, it brings no value.

What value does a bachelor’s degree have if some kid can just learn ruby and JavaScript on his own and go make $100k/yr at some startup? Of course a degree has value but it is possible to provide value without one. This is especially true in 2018 when anyone can learn pretty much anything online, and download whatever papers they want online and read them. Your mistake is in thinking that somehow a degree makes you s…

You assume that everyone can teach themselves with the same efficiency and effectiveness as quality guided instruction from real teachers they can directly interact with. Some can, but most cannot. Education is not a waste.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#168

Post by superhuzza »

maxxxxx wrote: post #53
make3 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In real life, problems are hard and require theoretical investigation to do well. That's the actual job! The theoretical investigation. Not the programming. The programming is really easy. which is part of why having 15 years in software doesn't have so much weight.

How many data scientists really do theoretical investigation? From what I see not too many. It feels a little like looking only for devs who can write complete operating systems and then having them write CRUD apps.

That's basically the job - people who can get, transform and interpret the data correctly.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#169

Post by nabla9 »

pmcollins wrote: post #10

My wife is a data scientist and this is one of her favorite quotes, from Dan Ariely: Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it... https://www.facebook.com/dan.ariely/posts/904383595868

"Deep learning is like big data: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it..."

Tim Hopper https://twitter.com/tdhopper/status/916383020835368960

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#170

Post by make3 »

gaius wrote: post #59
maxxxxx wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many data scientists really do theoretical investigation? From what I see not too many. It feels a little like looking only for devs who can write complete operating systems and then having them write CRUD apps.

90% of data science time is spent sourcing and then cleaning the data. 10% is spent preparing and delivering reports to stakeholders. The ML time is a rounding error. The job in which you are magically given a pristine dataset and can just tweak ML models all day doesn’t exist.

If you're a programmer by formation, then indeed you will be given a programming intensive, theoretically non-intensive task (or be found to be qualified for such a job). If you are more theoretically inclined, unsurprisingly, you end up with a more theoretically heavy job.
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