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JIZZ DENOUEMENT posted:Hello you beautiful sluts. How's everyone doing in their transition into data science? Which boot camp(s)? I'm very tired of my current job and total lack of options in my stagnant field, so I'm seriously considering taking a year off to travel and then do one of these camps. Working on it in my free time simply isn't enough.
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Apr 26, 2018 17:09
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Love Stole the Day posted:I wish there was a ladder of opportunity for people like me who were lost in the recession I wasn't even lost in the recession and I'm having trouble breaking in with a physics PhD. I know it counts for nothing and I have no advice, but I feel you.
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Dec 21, 2018 16:43
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I got an email from Dataquest today pushing an interview prep service called Pramp, they pair you with other people who want to practice interviews on the promise that you'll get better job offers. I haven't tried it, and likely won't. The email directs you do a fluff piece by the CEO of Pramp about how to "stand out" in the following way: Refael Zikavashvili posted:Rafi suggests that you send potential employers an email pointing out a challenge that their business is likely facing and how you would solve it. “That will super impress me,” he says. “Somebody who can actually identify problems just based on public information, and more than that will go the extra step and actually suggest a way to solve them? That will blow me away.” The article is, naturally, pushing Dataquest courses so you'll have the skills to waste many hours of your life on a quixotic quest to please someone in the hiring chain of a company who has never heard of you by solving their business problems free of charge. The positional arms race among job seekers is incredible. This reminds me of an interview my brother did with Facebook data science in October 2018. They asked him to come up with an idea for looking for inauthentic accounts. He pitched looking for posts by users in languages other than that spoken in the location the post was made or they usually post in. He added points like checking the currency used by the account and doing a network analysis that checked the poster's friends to see what language they post in. Geohistory for a sudden location change, like on travel. It was a decent on-the-spot pitch. The interviewers said that it was a terrible idea because trolls use VPNs, so location data is useless. Two weeks later this happened: quote:The statement follows a previous announcement from Facebook on Monday, in which the company said it had shuttered 115 accounts — 30 of those being Facebook accounts and 85 being Instagram accounts. It's probably a conspiracy theory to say they stole the idea from him, but given Facebook's lovely history it wouldn't surprise me. It is far more amusing to me that an idea declared stupid in an interview was used literally two weeks later to do the thing it was pitched to do.
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Feb 4, 2019 16:20
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Nocturtle posted:It's so strange, having just read about Data Incubator through this thread one of my physics colleagues mentioned unprompted they were applying for the free fellowship. For what it's worth they did mention that the Data Incubator application homework assignment was significantly harder than the other paid boot-camp programs they'd applied to. Its crazy, right? The business model is pretty simple. They take the recruitment fee from the company that hires you after you complete the camp. That's why they will gladly let people who only need a network go to the camp for free, because they think you'll get a job through whatever network they have. If they are charging you, it is because they don't think they can get the recruitment fee or they are double dipping. Neither is a good sign.
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Feb 4, 2019 21:56
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As you might expect, I was not accepted to The Data Incubator Fellows program. Was it because my project proposal was a video of Salacious Crumb laughing? Who knows, but there is still hope! Despite me not answering some of the questions either at all or with obvious disdain for the process, I can still pay them:The Data Incubator posted:Dear TDI Applicant, Cattle call round two has begun and it is good to know that my strong data science proposal consisting of this did not go unnoticed. They really pushed the importance of the proposal in their first cattle call: TDI Email #1 posted:By the completion of the challenge we expect: Of course I'm going to apply for the interview. I'm not sure I'll be able to do it, because they likely require me to talk to them at 3 AM my time (I'm in Europe), but if I do make the interview, I've got two questions: (1) What did you think of my proposal? (2) What's up with the 95% of TDI attendees that are not listed on your website? If any of you have any questions I might be able to ask, let me know. If you are earnest I'll ask that question before I likely blow it up. Edit: I have now received my second invitation to the scholar program in 18 hours. Also, they want to assure me that, if I do participate in paying them $17k for a shot at the job market, "only Scholars [and not the tuition-free Fellows] are eligible to interview with non-TDI partners." So, if you're a Fellow they put a hold on your application at a non-TDI partner? MickeyFinn fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Feb 9, 2019 |
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Feb 9, 2019 08:19
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Sobriquet posted:Has anyone taken a short-term financial hit to make this transition, and was it worth it? What’s a reasonable starting salary for someone with decent experience but it’s not all relevant? How quickly and how high can someone entering now reasonably expect to rise in the next 5-10 years (maybe the salary range of a senior dev or engineering lead)? I took a 75% pay cut to move to a job within my field doing machine learning because no one seems to be hiring analysts/ML people without going through a bootcamp first, and they don't seem to take people who aren't already doing the work. So far, it was worth it, while I like the work, everything else sucks as I had to move to Italy to even get the job (my field is DYING) and I'm not a fan, but my old employer was far, far worse and a total dead end. My biggest success in the data science/ML job hunt so far was a rejection email that came the same day I applied. But it seems like you already have an offer, so maybe this response isn't what you are looking for?
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Feb 10, 2019 18:52
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Tim Thomas posted:High energy accelerator physicists? Absolutely, dead as disco. The vast majority of my work is in industrial, medical and light sources, with a little bit of advanced accelerators. Those are dying pretty badly too. I looked for another job in the field for 3-4 years. The US labs won't touch me because I didn't do a post doc, the US companies won't touch me because I'm not from a lab*, so I had to find a small lab in Europe to try to GTFO. * Seriously, a new "start-up" in radiation therapy went out looking for people to design and build their sources. I didn't even get a call back and 6 months later the company I was working for was building the accelerators because the lab guys they hired don't know how to build poo poo without machinist and technicians with 50-60 years of domain specific knowledge holding their hands.
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Feb 11, 2019 07:40
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I'm doing to double post because I just had The Data Incubator "Scholar" interview. First off, it is a group interview, which was really weird, a whole new meaning to cattle call. But that does mean that I got to see other people present. One was pretty polished and interesting, so cool. The others less so. One was really basic, looking at likes versus location. The quality of the pitches (my own included) was pretty low and since he didn't even mention that my proposal video was of a creature from Star Wars laughing, I'd guess the proposal videos don't really matter at all. The description of the program I got was as follows (I'm going to paraphrase): There are 4 hours of lectures a week and the rest of the time is spent working on projects and doing interviewing/networking. They give you a project every week, tell you a little about it and then leave you to figure it out on your own. The interviewer framed it as a way to build your confidence about learning to tackle problems. He also specifically told me we'd be using Google and reading a lot of documentation. We were strongly encouraged to attend in person because getting help and collaboration is easier in person (note in-person is $17k, remote is $9k). He also said there is a Slack channel for the class in-person and remote alike. This was the answer to my question of what is the most important thing they will teach us. I was expecting "interviewing skills" but I guess a bromide about the value of hard work will do instead. Edit: I forgot to mention the most useful piece of information I got. The use GoToMeeting to do the interview and they won't let you share your desktop, calling it a 'disaster.' I dunno if that is because of technical problems or because of dick pics or what. MickeyFinn fucked around with this message at 13:35 on Feb 13, 2019 |
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Feb 12, 2019 21:15
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Well, I have been accepted as a "Scholar." Their website has a link to an Acceptance Page. The course of googling the projects they give us is scheduled to start on April 1, 2019 (funny day to start...) and I have a week to give them $1000 and a month to give them $16k more. In addition, they don't yet know WHERE I'll be placed and won't know until March 5, about a month before the course starts. It could be Boston, New York, DC or San Francisco. Online is also on option. This is such a mess, you have one month to find short term housing in some of the toughest housing markets in the US. I wonder how many students "prove their dedication to data science" by staying in flop houses for two months? There is a lot of information on the Acceptance Pages, for example, here is the "course list":
There is also a 12-day crash course in python/algorithm/SQL/stats that is a redirect to outside websites. There is a list of their hiring partners which is hundreds long and includes no information on when they placed people, Fellows versus Scholars or how long after completing the program it took to get a job. They do offer a 50% refund "if you remain jobless after 9 months." I don't know if working the counter at McDonald's counts as a job.
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Feb 16, 2019 07:50
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Kim Jong Il posted:Honestly a lot of this sounds really shady. Half the people I know in the field are self taught and have made it largely on their own personal momentum. When did they get started in the field and what were they doing before? What is "personal momentum?" I don't know a single person who works in data science under 40 who wasn't doing data science unofficially (they were doing statistics/data analysis for a company but were not called data scientist or analyst) or didn't go through a boot camp. I'm now also seeing entry level job postings that say work in academia doesn't count toward experience. Having been on the application trail for 2 or so years now, my sense is that the conventional wisdom of (we'll take people with lots of training and little experience) from a few years back is no longer accurate, if it ever was. The positional arms race of job applications suggests that is always true as well and that boot camps are now a necessity. But I welcome you telling me otherwise.
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Feb 17, 2019 08:26
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ultrafilter posted:Anyone looking to break into data science right now should read Data science is different now. It's not a happy read, but it's full of things you need to hear. Its weird to read a blog post by someone ridiculing the requirements in job posting who then turns around and lists a bunch of skills they spent 10 years acquiring on the job as basic for entry level now. Fields mature, sure, but I wonder if she realizes she is a part of the problem? I guess she doesn't have a problem because there are 200 applicants for every job opening. The quote from Hinton is taken horribly out of context: Geoff Hinton posted:One big challenge the community faces is that if you want to get a paper published in machine learning now it's got to have a table in it, with all these different data sets across the top, and all these different methods along the side, and your method has to look like the best one. If it doesn’t look like that, it’s hard to get published. I don't think that's encouraging people to think about radically new ideas. The quote is pulled out of context and Hinton's point is literally the opposite of the point she was trying to make. He does his share of whining about the peer reviewers not understanding him, which I totally empathize with, but he goes on to say the juniors will become seniors as the field develops. He is not saying that the field is saturated with juniors. The blog post looks like a poorly sampled attempt at bias reinforcement, rather than saying anything interesting. (Know all the skills on day 1! It is more boring than you think!) BattleMoose posted:Where are these jobs exactly, because they sure as gently caress aren't in Australia. I'm posting during what was supposed to be another interview that I was stood up for, so you're in some kind of company. Whether that company is good, I leave up to you. Suspicious Lump posted:This has to be the weirdest thing I've read. Why would entry level jobs require previous work experience and why would previous work experience not count? Not doubting what you've found, doubting the logic of the company. For obvious reasons I'm back on LinkedIn, so have some more stupid job postings. Here's an entry level position that wants 7+ years experience for a job titled "Data Science Machine Learning Lead." This one is 6-8 years and called "Senior." This one only wants 2+ years with strong knowledge of big data platforms and challenges that come with large scale platforms, I hope your AWS credit is topped up. Leidos only requires 15+ years of experience and a Top Secret clearance. These guys want 4+ years of experience. Doordash wants 2+ years of experience. 6sense (whatever that is) wants 4+ years of experience. I'm just scrolling through a list of "data science" jobs in California on LinkedIn filtered for Entry Level and I haven't skipped one yet, but I did find a job without an experience requirement! You can pay Standford CARE $5900 for a 1 week course of some kind followed by 7 weeks of team work. Holy poo poo, the grift is strong with that one. But with Stanford on your resume, I'd be surprised if it didn't work. Livermore didn't even bother to take experienced out of the title. Another 3+ years experience. Same for Twitter. I guess you could teach data science remotely with only 1 year of experience. Adobe wants 5+ years of experience. UCLA wants someone with a fair number of library-specific knowledge, but at least I didn't literally see x+ years for entry level. Ok, I'm off. If you have less than 3 years of data science experience your options are to teach data science or pay Stanford $6k for a 1 week course. MickeyFinn fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Feb 20, 2019 |
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Feb 20, 2019 20:47
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Suspicious Lump posted:Also, thank you for all the TDI posts you've made in thsi thread. Hilarious and scary at the same time, I was considering them after my PhD but now I'm staying the gently caress away. At this point, no one will find this surprising, but TDI emailed me on Thursday saying TDI Scholars Program - Acceptance Deadline Feb 22 posted:Just a reminder that the deadline to accept your place in our Spring 2019 cohort is TOMORROW - Friday, February 22nd. If you have any final questions please don't hesitate to ask! But I'm not paying $17k to google data science practicalities in *rolls the dice on March 5th* ... Boston and I'm also not going to tell them I'm not going, because I want to see how far this goes. I woke up this morning (Feb 23) to this: Your Data Incubator Admissions Status posted:While we were unable to extend you an offer as a Fellow, we would like to extend you an offer to participate in the next session of The Data Incubator from 2019-04-01 to 2019-05-24 as a Scholar. We only extend this opportunity to a very small group of candidates—though Fellows make up the top 1–2% of our applicants, Scholars comprise the next 2–3%—and you should take pride in the accomplishment! Those dates aren't the next session. They are this session, as in the one I've already missed the Feb 22 deadline for. They've constructed this email to look like they are doing me a favor by letting me carry my Scholar status in to the future, but it looks like they are desperate to fill up the classes. I'm trying to figure out who or what at Cornell has funded TDI as I'm curious what extent they are (or did) fund it and what they think of the description of the course work as "google it yourself." If anyone happens to have an information on it, please let me know! Edit: D'oh, start at wikipedia. MickeyFinn fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Feb 23, 2019 |
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Feb 23, 2019 08:54
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A sad illustration of the state of recruiting is the weekly emails I get from a company, asking me to schedule an interview, that is full of dead links and itself bounces replies. They do everything through web forms so when the web forms don't work, I guess they can't recruit.Budgie posted:Just finished my first week of the bootcamp I'm on. They told us that of the cohort that just graduated before us only 6 of them haven't had a job offer. So something like 75% of them had a job within a week of finishing the course. wtf My experience is that boot camps are all but required these days. Why filter resumes when you can pay someone to do it for you and then have the candidates come with an APPROVED sticker?
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Apr 9, 2019 07:36
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