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I have a Master's degree tailor made for doing data science but because it's not named data science but instead psychology nobody ever believes me and I have literally never gotten a data science interview in *checks* over a year despite having used Python, R, and SPSS to comfortable levels. Any advice?
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Dec 22, 2018 01:16
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Vomik posted:Why data science? I don’t know if the physics PhD has the same cachet there as other quant fields like finance. Hedge funds and banks love physic phds and the departments are mostly run by physic PhD who are looking for more. Field is smaller but pay is way higher. Basically this: ultrafilter posted:The average quality of life at tech companies is much higher than at financial companies. coupled with the fact that I don’t really want to move to New York. Whatever cachet physics had in quantitative finance didn’t rub off on me, anyway. The only people I know who have had any luck in either field left during or directly after grad school. Only idiots like me did the work in physics while in school, the smart people did Kaggle competitions and such.
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Dec 22, 2018 07:14
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MickeyFinn posted:Basically this: All fair points and of course the whole association with "less than savory" aspects of quantitative finance. That being said - are you limiting yourself to just tech companies? There are plenty of manufacturing, insurance, social science charities, hell lots of places that are looking to increase their analytics capability. It would give you a chance to build your name and longer term it would help you get into a tech spot by having the experience.
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Dec 22, 2018 17:00
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Vomik posted:All fair points and of course the whole association with "less than savory" aspects of quantitative finance. My last job was for a company that solely existed by mishandling government grants. There is no such thing as ethical work under capitalism so the bad rep of banks doesn’t really bother me. That said, I took a more academic job so I could work neat projects on the clock. Hell of a pay cut, but I didn’t have any good options. My experience with those other jobs you listed is that they are just as choosy. Edit: but their recruiting is somehow worse. MickeyFinn fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Dec 22, 2018 |
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Dec 22, 2018 23:41
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Jon Joe posted:I have a Master's degree tailor made for doing data science but because it's not named data science but instead psychology nobody ever believes me and I have literally never gotten a data science interview in *checks* over a year despite having used Python, R, and SPSS to comfortable levels. SPSS is used a lot in academia/market research but not much outside of it. It depends how you're using it - crosstabs, modeling, cleaning, etc... - try to write that more broadly and platform agnostic. Just assume that recruiters and resume parsers are only there to narrow down the pool, so you need to write a resume to get past them and get read by a real hiring manager, not necessarily the best representation of your skillset. Vomik posted:All fair points and of course the whole association with "less than savory" aspects of quantitative finance. If you search for something like "SQL" on a job site, you'll find large companies in any industry you can imagine. Anything retail/ecommerce will have huge supply chain and digital analytics operations. Who's sitting on so much customer data that they're regulated to hell and back? Finance, telecom, and health care. Between those four areas, you have a really big chunk of the Fortune 500. 6. McKesson
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Dec 29, 2018 07:07
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SpaceSDoorGunner posted:I'm currently active duty military but I spend most of my time at work on call, so I've started studying finance, which then lead me to learning about simple forecasting methods, which lead me into statistics, where I then realized that the only way anyone makes any forecasting stuff work enough to be not totally worthless is through methods that require massive amounts of computing power, which has taken me down the road of learning python and "datascience" though I don't know if it's cool to say "datascience" anymore. It depends on the area, but I don't really agree with this. A lot of models are just doing regression on data sets on a few thousand records, which can be done locally on your laptop. SAS can handle more but is probably mostly a relic at this point. So that means realistically, you're using something like R or Python sitting on top of a database, or directly working with the data in AWS, Google, or Azure. And what's great about the latter options is you can buy them pretty cheaply, especially if you're willing to use a spot instance of EC2. I know companies who can get dirt cheap computing hours if they can manage the EC2 auction system, and even vanilla AWS is a quantum leap better/cheaper from what was common place just a few years ago. ultrafilter posted:It probably will be. I don't have the exact numbers, but from the last BurtchWorks report I think something like 45% of data scientists have a PhD, 50% have a master's but no PhD, 5% have only a bachelor's, and the people who don't have any degree are rounding error. I would expect the percentage of people without a PhD will go up over time, but most of those positions will go to master's holders. Agree on not liking the masters programs generally. I don't see why those couldn't be offered as vocational training. They're fine-ish, but we need to break this mentality of degree inflation - those programs are mainly to reassure mid-career transitioners from other fields, I don't think they actually need them in terms of skills - maybe for networking, or forcing them to actually do the work. Those numbers you quoted seem WAY too high though, although it definitely depends how you define the occupation. I know a lot of people, including myself, who have just a BA and do just fine. (I kind of went academia -> private sector.)
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Dec 29, 2018 07:18
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laxbro posted:For those looking to go the self-taught route: https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-harvardx-cs50x For the first link, is the $90 certificate worth anything beyond auditing the class for resume purposes? I'm at a small media company handling a wide variety of clerical things, but at the moment my tech skills cap out around the level of building queries in access databases/pivot tables and vlookup commands in excel. A coworker works absolute wonders with Python, and one of my goals for this upcoming year is to learn enough to be able to incorporate it into what I'm doing. I was planning on picking up Data Science from Scratch: First Principles with Python and trying to work my way through it, but the course sounds like it might be a better alternative.
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Dec 29, 2018 09:59
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My gut tells me the certificate is meaningless compared to a portfolio projects you create with the knowledge. I started CS50 a few weeks ago and love it. I love that I'm not just learning code but why everything works. Feel like I'm learning to fish compared to just learning to buy the fish (just the syntax).
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Dec 29, 2018 15:23
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It took me way longer to figure this out than it should have: if you're a white dude and have a white dude name on your resume nobody really cares about certs. For everyone else, they can be immensely valuable.
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Dec 29, 2018 16:40
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quote="Pryor on Fire" post="491099511"] It took me way longer to figure this out than it should have: if you're a white dude and have a white dude name on your resume nobody really cares about certs. For everyone else, they can be immensely valuable. [/quote] I'm 1/2 on that one. 1.5/2. My first and last name are Greek and most people are ignorant and just see it as foreign. But youre spot on, hadn't thought about that angle.
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Dec 29, 2018 16:51
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Pryor on Fire posted:It took me way longer to figure this out than it should have: if you're a white dude and have a white dude name on your resume nobody really cares about certs. For everyone else, they can be immensely valuable. I'm a second-generation Cuban immigrant with a Latino last name and a white dude everything else 
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Dec 29, 2018 17:57
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So probably a silly question but apart from extracting data from a server, is SQL used for anything else? I'm trying to understand why SQL skills are so sort after.Jon Joe posted:I have a Master's degree tailor made for doing data science but because it's not named data science but instead psychology nobody ever believes me and I have literally never gotten a data science interview in *checks* over a year despite having used Python, R, and SPSS to comfortable levels. Suspicious Lump fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Jan 6, 2019 |
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Jan 6, 2019 07:05
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Databases are used for lots of things, more than just servers. Mobile apps may use them to store things you downloaded so you can see them offline. Video games may use them to keep track of lots of items. They're useful in lots of software.
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Jan 6, 2019 08:27
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Every nontrivial piece of software has a database, and SQL is the interface for the vast majority of them.
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Jan 6, 2019 16:55
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Is there a need to learn ETL and data engineering stuff? Because I’m a data analyst and all I do is write queries to pull data. Wondering if I need to extend my SQL skills if I do make the move into data science.
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Jan 6, 2019 17:34
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Suspicious Lump posted:So probably a silly question but apart from extracting data from a server, is SQL used for anything else? I'm trying to understand why SQL skills are so sort after. It's used for building a lot of reporting in this context, others have mentioned the database administration or software development side of things. From what I've seen the majority of data scientists don't have a background in stats, but will know how to build predictive models through whatever technique in some of those languages.
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Jan 14, 2019 04:02
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I recently went through a bunch of interviews, so if anyone is curious about questions you might hear at facebook or random startups, feel free to ask.Vegetable posted:Is there a need to learn ETL and data engineering stuff? Because I’m a data analyst and all I do is write queries to pull data. Wondering if I need to extend my SQL skills if I do make the move into data science. Not really although occasionally a startup wants a data scientist who will also be their data engineer. Suspicious Lump posted:So probably a silly question but apart from extracting data from a server, is SQL used for anything else? I'm trying to understand why SQL skills are so sort after. Yeah, absolutely. You can do some basic analysis and modeling in SQL which comes in handy when you have giant data sets. If you want to run a linear model for some forecast daily for 10,000 customers, it's nice to do that in database. It's particularly nice when you have a database which supports user defined functions so you can apply some model in Python or R across the db. pokie fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Jan 21, 2019 |
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Jan 21, 2019 07:58
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Thanks everyone for answering my silly question. I had no idea you can push some of the computation to the server, that's super cool. Now to go find out how to gain some SQL skills.
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Jan 22, 2019 06:24
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So when applying for data science jobs, what would be the best way to communicate a portfolio of coding/data jobs you have worked on? Is having a personal website the best way to do this? Attach it to your resume when submitting?
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Jan 23, 2019 17:43
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Suspicious Lump posted:Thanks everyone for answering my silly question. I had no idea you can push some of the computation to the server, that's super cool. Now to go find out how to gain some SQL skills. You should look at this to help you figure out what order to learn things in: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/181657
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Jan 23, 2019 17:56
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BattleMoose posted:So when applying for data science jobs, what would be the best way to communicate a portfolio of coding/data jobs you have worked on? Is having a personal website the best way to do this? Attach it to your resume when submitting? I just have a resume that's basically a short skills/educ summary and a list of projects a few of which have more elaborate descriptions. I used to try to fit it all on one page, but recruiters told me not to. I have been in the field for about 6 years fwiw.
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Jan 23, 2019 19:40
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My brother forwarded me an invite he got to some data science boot camp called The Data Incubator, I chucked them a resume and had a few friends write references because applying for jobs is a numbers/affinity game, so why not? Big surprise, I'm now a "semi-finalist" which gives me the "opportunity" to spend the weekend, already booked with 30-something hours of work, doing their challenge puzzles in the hope that I will tick all the right boxes. The best part is the so-called project that I need to propose to work on while I'm there at the 6-week "program." Because...Michael Li posted:One of the key components of the program is completing a capstone data science project to present to our (hundreds of) hiring employers. In fact, a major part of the fellowship application process is proposing that very capstone project, with many successful candidates having projects that are substantially far along if not nearly completed This is amazing. The application is the final exam! Once you are accepted with an already complete project, you're doing what for 6 weeks? Interviews? Better still, their acceptance break down is that 1-2% are fellows that go for free, 2-3% are scholars that pay $17k and the other 95%+ go unmentioned. What are they working the cafeteria at lunch? Given my past poor experience with Insight, I'm beginning to think I should get in on the various boot camp grifts instead of the data science itself.
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Jan 27, 2019 09:43
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MickeyFinn posted:My brother forwarded me an invite he got to some data science boot camp called The Data Incubator, I chucked them a resume and had a few friends write references because applying for jobs is a numbers/affinity game, so why not? Big surprise, I'm now a "semi-finalist" which gives me the "opportunity" to spend the weekend, already booked with 30-something hours of work, doing their challenge puzzles in the hope that I will tick all the right boxes. The best part is the so-called project that I need to propose to work on while I'm there at the 6-week "program." Because... In the gold rush, the only people who ever made it big were the ones selling shovels
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Jan 27, 2019 12:40
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MickeyFinn posted:My brother forwarded me an invite he got to some data science boot camp called The Data Incubator, I chucked them a resume and had a few friends write references because applying for jobs is a numbers/affinity game, so why not? Big surprise, I'm now a "semi-finalist" which gives me the "opportunity" to spend the weekend, already booked with 30-something hours of work, doing their challenge puzzles in the hope that I will tick all the right boxes. The best part is the so-called project that I need to propose to work on while I'm there at the 6-week "program." Because... Your take sounds correct to me. From the second hand experience I have of data boot camps they function by pre-screening their candidates so much that the finalists are all but guaranteed to succeed. A guy I knew went through one. He is a physics PhD with multiple publications who worked on one of the colliders. I mean, c'mon.
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Jan 27, 2019 20:37
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pokie posted:Your take sounds correct to me. From the second hand experience I have of data boot camps they function by pre-screening their candidates so much that the finalists are all but guaranteed to succeed. A guy I knew went through one. He is a physics PhD with multiple publications who worked on one of the colliders. I mean, c'mon. That’s me, too! Except for working on colliders, I build them. Do they work? I know one person who did a camp and they did get a job, but I don't want to extrapolate too much from that. MickeyFinn fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Jan 28, 2019 |
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Jan 28, 2019 07:26
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Bootcamps do work, but not how most people think they work. Their main function is to allow candidates to network with prospective companies, what you learn along the way is secondary. That's my take on bootcamps. I had friend go from no programming experience to working as a junior QA in a software company. From speaking to her, the bootcamp she did covered a large amount of topics in a very short time frame. Which means you don't get a lot of deep knowledge on one aspect. No idea why she jumped careers, she was making more working as a research assistant. For me, every boot camp I come across always seems to focus on the wrong aspects. For example, data science bootcamps IMO should be stats heavy, programming light but they always seem to flip it. But the ability to meet potential future employers is just so tantalising. my 2c
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Jan 28, 2019 07:58
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Suspicious Lump posted:Bootcamps do work, but not how most people think they work. Their main function is to allow candidates to network with prospective companies, what you learn along the way is secondary. That's my take on bootcamps. Ohh yeah, we have something similar in my field as well. You are meant to get a broad overview of some topic, a little experience playing with pre-packaged problems and (which almost no one recognizes) a ton of networking done. Even the "homework" is a vehicle for networking before actually learning the subject. Suspicious Lump posted:For me, every boot camp I come across always seems to focus on the wrong aspects. For example, data science bootcamps IMO should be stats heavy, programming light but they always seem to flip it. This is one of the reasons boot camps seem so weird to me because programming isn't the hard part, it is probably the most online field in the world. The reason they focus on the programming is the emphasis on projects. The positional arms race of the job market has made projects a required part of the application process. Teaching someone the basics of stats in 5-6 weeks doesn't end in a project with a known stack. That is another thing the boot camp is doing, showing you how to talk like a current data scientist to increase your affinity points. Suspicious Lump posted:But the ability to meet potential future employers is just so tantalising. This is all but required these days. I'm not looking at these camps because I think I will learn a lot of useful things in a 5-6 week crash course, but because they seem to be gatekeepers in to the field. Hiring practices can remain irrational longer than you can remain alive.
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Jan 28, 2019 09:14
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My current field has very little in terms of forward earning potential, so I signed up for a 6 month after work boot camp that I am nearly done with. It’s been a pretty cool experience, but the emphasis is absolutely on networking and a broad, quick overview with the expectation that you will invest yourself on your own time to really nail the concepts. I’ve just gotten to the part where my resume and skill level has been cleared to start applying for jobs, and we will likely being our big ‘final project’ in the next few weeks.
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Jan 28, 2019 16:18
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MickeyFinn posted:That’s me, too! Except for working on colliders, I build them. Suspicious Lump posted:For me, every boot camp I come across always seems to focus on the wrong aspects. For example, data science bootcamps IMO should be stats heavy, programming light but they always seem to flip it. I think that's because so much of the typical interview process is focused on fizzbuzz, data structure, sorting algorithm nonsense (and yes, I realize a lot of that is interesting and useful but imo not as a way to judge data science candidates). pokie fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Jan 28, 2019 |
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Jan 28, 2019 20:51
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meanolmrcloud posted:My current field has very little in terms of forward earning potential, so I signed up for a 6 month after work boot camp that I am nearly done with. It’s been a pretty cool experience, but the emphasis is absolutely on networking and a broad, quick overview with the expectation that you will invest yourself on your own time to really nail the concepts. I’ve just gotten to the part where my resume and skill level has been cleared to start applying for jobs, and we will likely being our big ‘final project’ in the next few weeks. If you don't mind, please let us know how the job hunt goes.
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Jan 28, 2019 21:17
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meanolmrcloud posted:My current field has very little in terms of forward earning potential, so I signed up for a 6 month after work boot camp that I am nearly done with. It’s been a pretty cool experience, but the emphasis is absolutely on networking and a broad, quick overview with the expectation that you will invest yourself on your own time to really nail the concepts. I’ve just gotten to the part where my resume and skill level has been cleared to start applying for jobs, and we will likely being our big ‘final project’ in the next few weeks. How much did part-time bootcamp cost you? I've been considering this option actually.
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Jan 28, 2019 22:59
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Suspicious Lump posted:How much did part-time bootcamp cost you? I've been considering this option actually. A bit over 6k. The school partnered with several companies to offer loans, which was helpful. It would’ve probably always been a pipedream, except I had colleague with the same non-tech degree, who left my current work abruptly to do a full time boot camp, and I was able to pick his brain about it. He was employed shortly after the boot camp ended, and seems to be much happier. I’m going to start applying to jobs, but I’d probably be more comfortable until after I graduated to look in earnest. So far, there looks to be a pretty good number of entry level/junior developer positions that want basically what we’ve been taught.
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Jan 29, 2019 00:49
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A few positions I'm looking at list some desirable qualifications including: - Design and maintenance of (non-)/relational databases (e.g. Postgres, Cassandra, MongoDB, SQL) - Database programming skills - Setup experience I've never set up a database before, but I've done SQL queries; likely I'm not very qualified, but I bet neither are a majority of applicants. Does anyone know of a good primer on the hard skills involved with database maintenance and setup? Would it be worth setting up a sandbox to learn this?
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Jan 30, 2019 05:32
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Seanzor posted:Your degree in English is a plus; good communication/interpersonal skills are increasingly in demand (and still depressingly rare) in tech - that major + coding stuff on the side is an appealing combo. Well, that's a bright side. I'm 40 with sixteen years of IT under my belt, but most of it helpdesk and management for the last three years. I'm looking to break into code but, honestly, I have no idea where to begin. Most of the online free tutorials seem to parrot the same basic concepts and don't really teach you anything about how to really get down and create stuff with it. I'm pondering going back to community college to learn, but....well, where does one really start in all of this? I have no idea where I'm going or what to do, but I kinda know I want to start coding....any advice? I'm completely lost.
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Jan 30, 2019 23:29
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Mad Doctor Cthulhu posted:I have no idea where I'm going or what to do, but I kinda know I want to start coding....any advice? I'm completely lost. What kind of stuff do you want to get into? Just looking to get a sense of what programming is like at this stage? If you like guided learning, try something like Harvard's CS50x introductory course on edX to get your feet wet solving small problems. From memory, they start using C almost right away, which is good. (They may also use a visual programming language like Scratch to begin with, which I find those pretty useless, but YMMV.) A good intro to CS course will be better-motivated and more substantial than one of those online tutorials. The problem-solving skills and understanding of fundamental programming constructs you'll pick up will generalise to different languages anyway. You also might learn more (and enjoy yourself more) by making stuff. Before I went back to uni to study CS, I got started by doing small, useful projects in Python. It's a pretty good first language according to one school of thought. A book like Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, which you can read for free on the website, might have a few ideas along these lines.
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Jan 31, 2019 03:10
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Rude Mechanical posted:What kind of stuff do you want to get into? Just looking to get a sense of what programming is like at this stage? I think I need to get a sense of what I can do with coding, because a lot of it seems a mystery. I'll hit up my community college and start seeking a good Intro to CS Course because otherwise it seems like I'm just wasting time. I guess I am looking for something to do with coding to show me what I can do with it, if that makes any sense.
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Jan 31, 2019 03:26
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Mad Doctor Cthulhu posted:I think I need to get a sense of what I can do with coding, because a lot of it seems a mystery. I'll hit up my community college and start seeking a good Intro to CS Course because otherwise it seems like I'm just wasting time. I guess I am looking for something to do with coding to show me what I can do with it, if that makes any sense. Yeah I understand, I was in the same boat. You can take CS50x for free on edX. Maybe give that a shot, see how you actually enjoy programming as a problem-solving activity, and go from there.
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Jan 31, 2019 03:33
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My lord, The Data Incubator wants me to post a video to YouTube giving them a 1 minute presentation. They also want me to give them the data I scraped. I'm starting to think this might be an actual scam instead of just employment grift. At least Insight had a poorly designed email-you-a-minute-before-the-interview system where they didn't ask you to debase yourself to the data gods. I'm getting really sick of "failing" these interviews for reasons that have nothing to do with my ability to do the work. You can find other people's submissions on YouTube! This is amazing. They have a question on data exploration with really straightforward questions that require minimal understanding of what data even is. And a cargo cult linked-list question similar to cracking the coding interview. MickeyFinn fucked around with this message at 09:07 on Jan 31, 2019 |
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Jan 31, 2019 07:59
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MickeyFinn posted:That’s me, too! Except for working on colliders, I build them. Whoa a fellow HEP physicist trying to escape a dying field and break into data science. I feel there's going to be even more people in the same boat after the full LHC dataset is worked through and whatever pipe-dream about a next-gen collider evaporates. These boot camp grift descriptions are just horrifying, no market can go unexploited.
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Jan 31, 2019 15:53
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Nocturtle posted:Whoa a fellow HEP physicist trying to escape a dying field and break into data science. I feel there's going to be even more people in the same boat after the full LHC dataset is worked through and whatever pipe-dream about a next-gen collider evaporates. I'm an accelerator physicist, LHC has been old news for about a decade now, and our field has been dying a lovely slow death for a long time. I don't know how a billion dollar project only results in like 6-7 new hires, but somehow the labs manage it. This guy's blog has two posts on The Data Incubator and apparently it is poorly run and they simply have you spam applications until you get a hit. That's consistent with this reddit thread where one of the people thinks the video doesn't count for much. Since the other challenge questions are straightforward, I'm going to submit a video of Jabba laughing for my "interview" and see what happens. Likely nothing. Edit: A number of the challenge questions are so badly mangled that the results have to be little different from random chance in your interpretation of the question, even if you understand the mathematics and/or data-toucher-commands. The best I can say is that it is an affinity test. It did cause me to fool around with datetime a little more than I have in the past, but otherwise meh. Also, I had to use a longer video of Salacius Crumb because they check for video length. MickeyFinn fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Feb 1, 2019 |
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Jan 31, 2019 19:48
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