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Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

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Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#21

Post by peatmoss »

_qbxp wrote: post #13

I'll be completely honest, as your standard "data scientist" who hopped on the bandwagon and came from having a PhD in academia in an unrelated field, I cringe at these articles. I'm not entirely sure why. I think it may be two-fold: 1. A little bit of the selfish "oh no, the secret's out, at what point is my salary going to drop when the demand is met by the dedicated Master's degrees and bootcamps?" and 2. These ar…

My goodness, are you me? I've been having exactly the same thoughts. Provided one finds a data science role that roughly aligns with your training / interests, the actual work is comically easy compared to what you go through in academia.

A boot camp can easily teach someone to, say, estimate a linear model or run k-means. I dread the future when the industry decides the right way to put up barriers is by creating ever less-realistic interview loops that are even more coin-flippier, dice-rollier, card-shufflier.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#22

Post by freehunter »

kurthr wrote: post #4
geogra4 wrote: post #2

One of the most ill-defined too.

I'm actually not that impressed at $160k for "the hotest job" in a major metro, and it sounds like their example with a masters in Stat might be using something more than Xcel plots. Kind of disgusted though, that Equifax "is shortening the hiring process to keep anyone from slipping away." They could fix their security practices before hiring anyone with Scientist on their resume.

I’m sure the people implementing their security are the same people recruiting and hiring new employees in an unrelated field.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#23

Post by aje403 »

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

Big data's also like a big dick. Everyone's running around telling their clients they've got an 8 incher if they buy.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#25

Post by ims »

brookhaven_dude wrote: post #12

We have two closely related groups in our company. Mathematical Optimization and Data Science. I am in the optimization group, but when I query the data scientists, they seem to be doing similar things - simulation, network optimization, resource allocation and planning. I am not sure why management wants to call them data science.

I'd guess that historically the Mathematical Optimization department has comprised "legacy" operations research people (spreadsheet modeling and decision analysis, linear and nonlinear modeling with AMPL-type tools, SAS statistics, etc) and the Data Science group is newer and more software-ish.

Am I right?

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#27

Post by baxtr »

_qbxp wrote: post #13

I'll be completely honest, as your standard "data scientist" who hopped on the bandwagon and came from having a PhD in academia in an unrelated field, I cringe at these articles. I'm not entirely sure why. I think it may be two-fold: 1. A little bit of the selfish "oh no, the secret's out, at what point is my salary going to drop when the demand is met by the dedicated Master's degrees and bootcamps?" and 2. These ar…

Just add a grain of AI or blockchain and you’ll be fine!

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#28

Post by rossdavidh »

_qbxp wrote: post #13

I'll be completely honest, as your standard "data scientist" who hopped on the bandwagon and came from having a PhD in academia in an unrelated field, I cringe at these articles. I'm not entirely sure why. I think it may be two-fold: 1. A little bit of the selfish "oh no, the secret's out, at what point is my salary going to drop when the demand is met by the dedicated Master's degrees and bootcamps?" and 2. These ar…

If the example of coding bootcamps is indicative, then there will be a period of hiring of Data Scientists with minimal background, and an institutional learning period of "oh they are cheaper but don't deliver results we can use", and thus the job will still remain one with more openings than qualified candidates for some time to come.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#30

Post by tom_b »

FTA (examples of data science):

  targeting health-care customers for hospitals 
  people who can turn social-media clicks and user-posted 
    photos into monetizable binary code is among the biggest 
    challenges facing U.S. industry
  “sentiment analysis,” or finding a way to quantify how
    many tweets are trashing your company or praising it
  determine how customers prioritized paying bills
  “recommendation engines” - those programs that predict
    what you may want to buy next
  advertising
My background is traditional business intelligence, finding actionable data for high level leaders.

A common response on this thread is that little data science is actually occurring in the business world. It would be incredibly useful to me (and I suspect other readers of HN), to hear from other participants on the thread what data science and methods they are using.

I'll kick it off with data analysis examples from my workplace:

  1 - Analysis of patient accruals to various clinical trials.  
    Mainly tracking against goal numbers.  No statistics or ML.
  2 - Analysis of tissue collection opportunities to answer the question:  
    Are we obtaining samples useful to future research opportunities?  No statistics or ML.
  3 - Creating models to accurately predict patient accrual rates for individual studies across various 
    different variables (race, ethnicity, gender, age).
    Simple statistics, probably just a linear regression model.  This is a new effort.
  4 - a long, on-going, and currently unsuccessful attempt to extract useful data from pathology 
    reports (free text descriptions from pathologists examining various collected tissues for 
    both medical treatment and research purposes)
In addition, I know of a few NLP motivated efforts to train classifiers - say, given a set of 500 manually labeled papers, can a classifier be built that would be effective in bucketing an additional 8,000 papers?
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