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Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

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Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#201

Post by mr_toad »

wuliwong wrote: post #149

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 cand…

I’ll be blunt - working with data is a lot more fun than working with line of business applications. That’s why so many more people want to do it.

People compete in machine learning for fun (e.g. kaggle.com). I doubt anyone works on CRM systems for fun.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#202

Post by newen »

mathinpens wrote: post #192
notlob wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is missing my pet step: doing the literature review. One of the earliest, most important, and most useful lessons I learned from a senior grad student: "a day in the library can be worth a week at the bench."

Or this: you spend 4 months on a project and belatedly notice schmidhuber proved a much better result in 1985 and yells at you and you get kicked out of academia

You don't get kicked out of academia for that... Well maybe if you're a student and you lose your funding. It's really embarrassing and I'm sure frustrating too. I've reviewed a couple of papers where they didn't do their literature review, there were lots of obvious (to people who read) prior work, and I've had to straight reject their papers. I feel bad for them but do your literature review folks!

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#203

Post by mathinpens »

newen wrote: post #202
mathinpens wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or this: you spend 4 months on a project and belatedly notice schmidhuber proved a much better result in 1985 and yells at you and you get kicked out of academia

You don't get kicked out of academia for that... Well maybe if you're a student and you lose your funding. It's really embarrassing and I'm sure frustrating too. I've reviewed a couple of papers where they didn't do their literature review, there were lots of obvious (to people who read) prior work, and I've had to straight reject their papers. I feel bad for them but do your literature review folks!

I was kidding!!! But people do take literature review seriously (which on the balance is good)

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#204

Post by starpilot »

resolaibohp wrote: post #102
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…

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…

Every data scientist started out with no experience. This gatekeeping will have to come down if the industry actually wants data scientists who have experience.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#205

Post by gaius »

Puer wrote: post #68
gaius wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The running assumption on HN seems to be that ML/data science jobs are easy because you can just "plug in" already implemented algorithms and just expect things to work. I think the barrier for most of these jobs is a proper statistics education--one that involves active exploration of real world data that's imperfect and has to be cleaned. Very rarely is there an obvious solution to big data problems and much of the…

I think the barrier for most of these jobs is a proper statistics education--one that involves active exploration of real world data that's imperfect and has to be cleaned.

It's a bit of both really. If the data science job is in the field of predictive maintenance for example, then a (relatively) simple model may be sufficient to add business value straight away, and the hard part is a deep understanding of the potential failure modes of the machinery you're predicting on and the kinds of sensors used to gather the raw data. There's no "one size fits all".

This is one of my favourite papers on the subject, written by one of the lecturers on the DS course I did: https://users.cs.duke.edu/~cynthia/docs/RudinETAL2010.pdf

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#206

Post by 190807 »

MadSudaca wrote: post #54

I don't think data science would be a hot job if advances in data engineering (arguably, another ill-defined term) hadn't been achieved. Because of this I like this definition of data scientist, although I can't remember where I read it: "A data scientist is someone who knows more about statistics than your average software developer, but more about software development than your average statistician".

Or: "A data scientist is someone who knows less about statistics than your average statistician, and less about software development than your average software developer".

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#207

Post by madengr »

zpatel wrote: post #190
madengr wrote: post #78

My wife will be attending a university based data science boot camp. She has spent 12 years as s microelectronics process engineer. Seems a dead end job and can’t break the $100k mark. Hopefully it will be worth it.

But is that something she will like ?

Yes, as she already does lots of statistical process control, design of experiments, etc.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#208

Post by resolaibohp »

ralphc wrote: post #198
bufordtwain wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Unjust as it may seem though, requiring a PhD in science is a free and simple way for employers to narrow down the field of candidates to those who are good at data science. It's the data science equivalent of requiring a CS degree when looking for a programmer. It's natural for employers to use that tool.

But if data scientist is the sexiest job of the 21st century, and everyone's going to need one or more, there won't be enough PhD's to go around. Someone's going to have to "take a chance" on the lesser degreed or risk falling behind their competitors that have data scientists of some effectiveness.

There are not as many data scientist jobs as the hype makes it seem. Maybe this will change in the future but right now there is not such a lack of qualified candidates to justify taking chances on lesser degree candidates.

All this hype makes it so everyone wants to be a data scientist. You get people who change careers to go into this new hot career. You also have a pool of people who have been working with data well before the hype with experience. The people trying to break into data science will have a very hard time competing with the people with experience over the pool of jobs out there.

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#209

Post by aje403 »

jlelonm wrote: post #195
aje403 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average CS student didn't do that great in LA/Calc. Most CS programs don't require vector calc. At an average uni, the vector calc class/linear algebra will be extremely forgiving and you really don't need to understand the material. I don't think any undergrad CS program in the country teaches enough statistics and probability to understand some of the harder latent models or generative modeling. The math can ge…

What're some examples of a "harder latent model"

Here’s a really hyperbolic example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.4425.pdf

Re: Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

#210

Post by coldtea »

solomatov wrote: post #163
coldtea wrote: post #26

A more correct version would be: "Is America's current fad job, like tons of similar jobs before it" (have lived through 4-5 of those "hot jobs").

What were the fad jobs in USA before?

E.g. around the dot-com bubble it was "web designers" -- now they're a dime a dozen.

In the 90s/early 00s there was the biology/bio-engineering/bionformatics trend -- everybody was thinking of going into biology when I went to university -- that dried up soon as well [1]

[1] https://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bmb.20...

Here's a good list written by another HN member:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8864737

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