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Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#41

Post by spamizbad »

walrus1066 wrote: post #35
spamizbad wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Disclaimer: generalization ahead) That might be because they're starting to get hip to the fact that too many data scientists struggle to produce professional-level code, forcing you to pay a software developer to create the actual deliverable from their prototype. At that point, why not just hire a really bright software engineer who can code well and knows how to work with data?

I'm not sure it's easy for a software engineer to develop a model, it's quite an orthogonal skill, you need a solid grasp on mathematics and especially statistics.

True, but those software engineers exist, and FAANG and FAANG-adjacent companies offer the work opportunities, prestige and salaries to attract those "twofer" engineers.

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#42

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

perfunctory wrote: post #37
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fun job, though. You can spend your entire tenure explaining to people that just because something starts and serves up a web page, it's not a good idea to run 30 year old software in Production... eventually you get to the point where you can only hire Senior Software Engineers to take care of our software and then it becomes a fucking priority to unfuck your stack because your payroll costs are the most ex…

> because your payroll costs are the most expensive line item Payroll costs are always the most expensive item. And they should be.

Doesn't always have to be, there are some industries where a small group of payroll can be outspend by high levels of hardware.

If you're a tech heavy company, you'll sometimes see a cloud bill being higher than your payroll costs.

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#43

Post by htfy96 »

[deleted] wrote: post #31

[deleted]

The story sounds quite familiar in both data scientist and system programming parts - in past years system programming(especially embedded system) is highly undervalued. As I know some of my friends doubled their package simply by switching from firmware dev to embedded ML model deployment, and they said the new job was even easier.

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#45

Post by jriot »

bradleyjg wrote: post #38
jriot wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except most software engineers aren't qualified to go into data science.

What exactly are the qualifications? I would have thought a serious, sustained study of statistics--starting with a strong base knowledge of the mathematics of probability and building from there. But based on the resumes I've seen that doesn't seem to be the common opinion.

I would argue you are correct and those without that knowledge will find themselves in over their head quickly without that knowledge.

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#46

Post by jriot »

mkl wrote: post #17
jriot wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except most software engineers aren't qualified to go into data science.

The appropriate knowledge can be acquired if you put in effort. This information is useful for those deciding whether the effort is worth it.

The appropriate knowledge can be acquired in anything if you put in the effort.

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#47

Post by [deleted] »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #26
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not find my Data Engineer job either boring or dead end, but thanks for the condescension.

I love data engineering - atleast when I practiced it at an adtech company, it involved lots of interesting challenges around performance, distributed systems and a mix of SWE & Ops work. Buut, applying to data engineering jobs I see where the parent poster is coming from (minus the condescension) - a lot of them are about writing simple ETL jobs, and they tend to be lower paid & less prestigious.

[deleted]

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#48

Post by sonofaragorn »

Any Data Scientists from Toronto here? I'm up for a salary review soon after my first year after grad school and I'm trying to get a feeling for how much I should ask for.

Indeed.com shows a $121k average for Toronto. Does that sound somewhat accurate? I'm only making $85k so maybe I should be asking for much more.

Re: Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

#49

Post by closeparen »

deepnotderp wrote: post #28
bitL wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data Engineer role is about building big data/streaming pipelines for data and often DevOps aspects of keeping such pipeline deployed and online. A boring, dead-end job. Avoid. Make yourself both ML/DL master and SWEng and you'll be doing extremely well.

You know that's usually the hard part of ML projects, right? It may be boring, but it also tends to be the less least replaceable component.

SQL skills are expected of every data scientist and backend engineer, but are also found in a much larger and cheaper labor pool. As far as I can tell, the data engineering role exists to take advantage of those economics.

ETL pipeline queries and configs are absolutely critical, make or break an ML project, and account for most of its labor hours. But they are the most commoditized part of it.

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