Data Science is America's Hottest Job (bloomberg.com) 79
Anonymous readers share a report: It turns out that even in the wake of Facebook's privacy scandal and other big-data blunders, finding people who can turn social-media clicks and user-posted photos into monetizable binary code is among the biggest challenges facing U.S. industry. People with data science bona fides are among the most sought-after professionals in business, with some data science Ph.Ds commanding as much as $300,000 or more from consulting firms.
Job postings for data scientists rose 75 percent from January 2015 to January 2018 at Indeed.com, while job searches for data scientist roles rose 65 percent. A growing specialty is "sentiment analysis," or finding a way to quantify how many tweets are trashing your company or praising it. A typical data scientist job pays about $119,000 at the midpoint of salaries and rises to $168,000 at the 95th percentile, according to staffing agency Robert Half Technology.
Job postings for data scientists rose 75 percent from January 2015 to January 2018 at Indeed.com, while job searches for data scientist roles rose 65 percent. A growing specialty is "sentiment analysis," or finding a way to quantify how many tweets are trashing your company or praising it. A typical data scientist job pays about $119,000 at the midpoint of salaries and rises to $168,000 at the 95th percentile, according to staffing agency Robert Half Technology.
The key to Data Sience. (Score:4, Interesting)
On a SQL based server if you do a left inner or and outer join on an other table, you can use logic to connect two data elements together.
Quite honestly that is all that I see Data Scientist consultants do. Then they make a graph of the data and get paid big bucks. Vs. our poor schlubs who are not called Data Scientists who do the same thing, and get yelled at for asking the same questions.
Re:The key to Data Sience. (Score:5, Interesting)
I hold the title of a "Data Analytics Manager", I don't get paid even 1/2 of what this article shows, and yes -- you are completely correct.
In fairness, there is a huge difference between what nearly all companies call "Data Analytics" and the Data Science jobs making $300k+. My wife is also a data analytics manager (not her exact title, but close enough), and she makes just over a third that amount. A significant portion of the job is very similar, such as cleaning data sets and doing the business analysis necessary to know what questions to ask of the data, but the actual analysis performed by data scientists requires significantly more mathematical rigor (at least for the highly paid ones, not just the ones inflating their title).
My wife's job is still very complex and takes a high level of skill (like most jobs which pay $100k+) but it certainly doesn't require a PhD in Mathematics, or even for her to be good at math (she isn't). She never needs to provide a range of estimates or confidence intervals; her estimates have more to do with intuition and experience over formulas.
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Depends on where you live, I guess; however, here in Minneapolis, you should expect to make ~125K for DE/DS role if you have >7 years experience.
Most of the people coming on to my team, straight out of undergrad, make ~$60-70K and are pushing $90K within 2-3 years.
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The field is more than Table Joins, but the Data Scientists who come in and charge Thousands of dollars a day, tend to be just doing simple DB stuff and use the fancy title that some just make up, so they can get the Data Scientist money.
True Data Scientist do a lot more, but they are not the ones most businesses hired.
Re:The key to Data Sience. (Score:4, Funny)
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At a previous job, I was using a splunk app (hasn't been updated since 2014) to get hockey scores for my boss for his daily dashboard readout. Supposedly being able to write a bunch of stuff to throw people a report gleaned from Splunk or an ELK stack is big business. However, it is something a sysadmin winds up doing often, just as one does SQL stuff for reporting as well.
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Re:The key to Data Sience. (Score:5, Informative)
If you can train an existing DBA to be a data scientist quickly, then you don't really need a data scientist. Data science is about modeling complex phenomenon. It is about building statistical models, analyzing statistical significance, connecting pieces of an incomplete puzzle.
It really has little in common with what a DBA usually does. Yes, they'll both write programs. Yes, they'll both use a bunch of data. Yes, they probably both took calculus II. But the commonalities stop here.
A physicist, MD, algorithmician, or economist would probably be closer to being data scientists than a system oriented DBA.
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*ssssh...*
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Maybe you should have been modded as "Funny", instead? Because, as a Data Engineer who works side by side with Data Science, I can absolutely guarantee you, in many cases, they are not very good at doing anything at all in SQL; they are way more into pre-built R and/or Python packages to do their work.
The real fucking heroes are the Data Engineers (ETL guys for you old schoolers) who are doing the operational pipelining of the data flows in and out of the models built in isolation by Data Scientists.
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From what I've seen, "data scientist" means someone who can run a prepackaged machine learning or simple stats program on some data without knowledge of or much regard for how it was collected or what it represents.
I.e. "data scientist" is kind of like a regular scientist except without the deep domain knowledge, skills and scientific method.
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Nope, what they are doing is confusing the term, data scientist with data analyst. Get away from the silliness that writing data formulas are all that flash, what is important is knowing what data is important, not the data formulas to dig it out. So the idea of the composite of a very experienced data analysts, where is it their broad knowledge across a broad range of subjects that gives them insight into valuable data and that bit of knowledge that allows them to write data formulas. It is knowing what da
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On a SQL based server if you do a left inner or and outer join on an other table, you can use logic to connect two data elements together.
Quite honestly that is all that I see Data Scientist consultants do. Then they make a graph of the data and get paid big bucks. Vs. our poor schlubs who are not called Data Scientists who do the same thing, and get yelled at for asking the same questions.
Says the guy who can't even spell science correctly.
Did you even RTFA? Even the summary states that sentiment analysis is one of the main reasons data science is hot. A goddamn join isn't going to help you classify a document.
This week's most popular job is... (Score:2)
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The hottest job seems to be Presidential apologist anyway. They hire more of those mealy mouthed lying traitors every day to replace the ones going to prison.
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Eh. But to do that, you need years of education and training. Being a "data scientist" could be done after one summer boot camp!
I imagine data scientists are like consultants: a huge range in value added (or subtracted) by any particular "data scientist".
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Web Master Flashback! (Score:4, Interesting)
Web Master was the hottest job 20 years ago. Right up until every realized that the position was better filled via a mix traditional IT techs and software engineers.
Data science will go the same way, but it will be software engineers and statisticians that replace the current crop of bootcamp trained data "scientists". (actually, all real data science shops already do it that way... the market will correct)
uh (Score:3)
finding people who can turn social-media clicks and user-posted photos into monetizable binary code
I'm immobile because I can't figure out which part of that to gnaw to shreds first.
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Why? That seemed like the sanest line in the whole summary. That seems like pretty much what most data scientists do.
Typo (Score:1)
" People with data science bona fides are among the most (sought-after) hated professionals in business, "
Let me guess ... (Score:1)
They sit right next to the social media consultants.
Shame it's not legal to wrap them in barbed wire and shoot them into the sun - which is the only adequate treatment I can think of.
What is science? (Score:2)
Posit hypothesis
Run experiment to validate or reject hypothesis
So it seems that we now need data scientists to do things with data that were supposed to be done by OLAP systems, i.e. find correlations between dimensions that were not supposed to be trivial? Data mining?
Here come the bootcamps (Score:2)
https://flatironschool.com/pro... [flatironschool.com]
Isn't AI the hottest job? Bubble 2.0 baby! (Score:2)
Am I the only one who sees some slight similarities to the First Dotcom Bubble? Obviously data analysis is a very useful skill to have, but I think it's going to get to the point where anyone running a sanitized data set through an R or Python package will be a Data Scientist. We've already got the AI, Blockchain and Data Science bootcamps cranking people out now! In fact, I thought I read the other day that some survey proclaimed AI as the hottest job.
I think this bubble is going to last a very long time a