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Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#31

Post by jtcond13 »

NumberCruncher wrote: post #9

It depends on how you define "data science". If you are like AWS and say that using logistic regression is machine learning, then yes, you can teach yourself data science. Learn SQL, read a couple of books on logistic regression, use some open data for building a couple of models. There are many companies where you can have a decent job and an easy living with SQL and logistic regression on your tool belt. If you say…

+1 to this. SQL + Logistic regression creates millions of dollars in business value every year. Some of that could be yours!

Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#32

Post by mr_overalls »

cwyers wrote: post #26
qubex wrote: post #2

You seem to assume that the only use for knowledge is garnering employment: this is patently false, as you could easily learn something and apply it for your own pleasure in the non-professional domain. P.S. It's called ’statistics’.

> P.S. It's called ’statistics’. No, it's not. Read Breiman's "Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures." http://www2.math.uu.se/~thulin/mm/breiman.pdf "Statistics" has largely been concerned with the "data modelling culture" Breiman talks about; a lot of data science is focused on algorithmic modelling, things like neural nets, random forests, and so on. A lot of these techniques have been refined outside of modern st…

I agree with this observation. And given data science's distinguishing emphasis on algorithms and process, maybe it would be more properly called "data engineering."

Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#34

Post by soVeryTired »

StavrosK wrote: post #13
NumberCruncher wrote: post #9

It depends on how you define "data science". If you are like AWS and say that using logistic regression is machine learning, then yes, you can teach yourself data science. Learn SQL, read a couple of books on logistic regression, use some open data for building a couple of models. There are many companies where you can have a decent job and an easy living with SQL and logistic regression on your tool belt. If you say…

> no, you can not teach yourself data science. You will need at least one degree. Or more. Why not? What is it that prevents anyone from learning anything without getting a degree? I disagree with your statement, I think it might be harder, but I don't think anyone "cannot teach themselves X".

It's quite possible that you can teach yourself a lot of the relevant background. If you read David Barber's book cover to cover and do all the problems, that's a machine learning masters' course covered.

But the problem is that you're competing against job applicants who already have a degree in machine learning. So it will often be the case that you're lucky to make it past an initial HR screen. If they want to interview ten people, life is easier for them to pick ten who already have the right piece of paper.

Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#36

Post by NumberCruncher »

StavrosK wrote: post #13
NumberCruncher wrote: post #9

It depends on how you define "data science". If you are like AWS and say that using logistic regression is machine learning, then yes, you can teach yourself data science. Learn SQL, read a couple of books on logistic regression, use some open data for building a couple of models. There are many companies where you can have a decent job and an easy living with SQL and logistic regression on your tool belt. If you say…

> no, you can not teach yourself data science. You will need at least one degree. Or more. Why not? What is it that prevents anyone from learning anything without getting a degree? I disagree with your statement, I think it might be harder, but I don't think anyone "cannot teach themselves X".

I may be biased because I am from a country where the first degree was for free and we did not have to pay tuition fee. At that time "I can teach myself X" meant "I can teach myself X so why not have a paper about it?". A lot of us are on the job market and you compete with us.

Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#37

Post by jorgemf »

You can get a job with a portfolio in data science. Just go to kaggle and beat everybody in all competitions. That is worth more than a degree. Companies will try to reach you if you can do it.

But, honestly, I think it is very difficult to learn data science by yourself. Someone with experience teaching you will make a huge difference. Data science is different than programming as in programming you can see step by step what is happening, in data science most of times it either works or doesn't. And you know it after your algorithm has run through all data for at least an hour. It is really hard to learn this way, you need hints that only someone with experience can provide to you. Moreover you can do a lot of mistakes without knowing it, for example, when cleaning the dataset people use the whole dataset to fill gaps and them split it for training and test. It feels right but that it is a huge mistake that invalidates the whole experiment (because you use information from the test set in the train set, to fill the gaps).

Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#38

Post by eyko »

SimbaOnSteroids wrote: post #28
alkonaut wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It depends on how you define "data science". I think the widely accepted definition is "Statistics, but on a Mac"

Shots fired??? I'm new to the startup community, e.g. still in school but excited about startups, is there a general aversion to Windows and why is that?

Maybe because it's not unix-like. But I know many colleagues using Windows so I don't think there's an issue with that.

Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#39

Post by quadrature »

A good programmer with even just a high level overview of ML and Stats concepts would be an incredibly valuable asset to a data science team. Most ML people are academics who tend to not have good software engineering skills, finding people who master both domains is really hard.

Also to add to that most of the work in ML is feature engineering, data cleaning, testing and building pipelines which all require a good software engineering background.

Re: Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

#40

Post by samuraixp »

nl wrote: post #30
qubex wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't treat it as trivial (exactly) but I oozed what I judge a suitable level of condescension for what is clearly a very venal question that transpires a very narrow horizon. As for the ”it's called ’statistics’” comment: it is, and that subject has a rich history going back centuries — much of the ’modern’ ”data science” is just a less refined, more brutal reinvention of those same techniques.

I run a data science team. We have statisticians (yes, plural) on my team who have published in Nature, and plenty with other backgrounds. Even ignoring the data engineering side, there is plenty that statisticians don't do or know which is useful data science. Take the two attitudes to p-tests, or what a "reasonable number of features" means. You drop the Jeff Dean "consider training models with billions of features…

Awesome, so what qualifications do your Data Science team members have and would you hire someone without a degree? Or what if they had a data science / ML / AI MOOC like Udacity or Coursera? And do you have any advice for OP or others who don't have degrees?
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