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/sci/ - Science & Math

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10202473 No.10202473 [Reply] [Original]

How much of a meme is data science? Does a BS in math from a state university with a 3.0 GPA have any hope of landing a job as a data scientist? Not exactly a brainlet but I struggle to work on anything more than 40 hrs a week.

>> No.10202483

I've never even heard of a data scientist. Isn't being able to use data a prerequisite to being a scientist at all?

>> No.10202500

>>10202483
It's been a meme for a minute. It means different things to businesses. I'm talking about a role where you decide what questions to ask to optimize business outcomes, e.g. predicting ticket purchase, ride request, or whatever volume based on historical data, identifying underexploited markets from demographic data, explaining bad business outcomes, etc. Basically convincing management in sales, marketing etc that some statistical models point to a clear decision.

>> No.10202511

>>10202500
Why not go into accounting?

>> No.10202528

>>10202511
data scintists make more money and are more prestigious than accountants since they use large amounts of data and use them intelligently to make important business decisions.
>>10202473
to answer your questions, it depends on your social skills. As a data scientist, no one will really understand what you do and will be worried that you'll eliminate their jobs. Can you sell people on an idea which they can't understand? Can you break down many, many silos from different parts of a company, each with their own subculture and ways of doing things? Data science is just as much, if not more, a socially demanding job than it is an intellectually demanding.
Seriously, basic regression in excel gets you most of the way, the really tricky part is convincing your boss to stand behind a decision which might go contrary to his intuition.

>> No.10202555

>>10202528
Yeah, but your advice has to work, right? Is it even possible to prove your advice worked?

>> No.10202636

>>10202555
of course it has to work, but the thing is that many people (usually not your boss or most management) can take data and make simple, correct predictions. The role of a data scientist is to somehow convince management to make a decision (which involves taking ownership of its consequences) based on the prediction which they don't understand. That is the hard part, but if a data scientist can do it they will become a huge boon to their company. Hence the big salaries and corporate prestige, which unfortunately leads to smart people with poor social skills thinking it is the career for them when in fact few other things could be further from the truth.
tldr: after a certain point of technical competence, social skills very quickly become the limiting factor because all the data in the world won't help you if no one believes you.

>> No.10202651

>>10202636
Adding onto this, you need to know how to present data, like pie charts and stuff along with being basically a god at report writing. 90% of what you do will be unknown to anyone else in the company, so you need to have skills to make complex or non-parametric data presentable to people who ony know basic math.

>> No.10202695

>>10202500
that sounds like an SQL job for a company

>> No.10202704

>>10202500
Sounds dull

>> No.10203028

>>10202636
That makes sense, but how are outcomes for the business causally tied to your intervention using data?

>> No.10203040

>>10203028
They aren't, which is why there are no job openings

>> No.10203063

>>10203028
Anon, if you were too low iq to know that iq existed, how would you know to increase it?

>> No.10203483

>>10203028
Dude this is pretty much analytic. If we already know that the business strategy causes a business outcome, any intervention in the strategy will result in a change in outcome.

>> No.10203751

Data Science is not a meme as is a rapidly growing industry that needs people. Better have a minor in cs and maybe a masters to get hired though

>> No.10203781

>>10202473
Anyone who has taken high school statistics and maybe calc has the necessary knowledge to model and predict as a data scientist.

The problem is most businesses want to see some sort of proof that you know how to use sql,hadoop,tableau, and excel to the extent their broken down ass backwards infrastructure requires. It is thankless as any other analyst role and as mind numbing as any finance job.

In a lot of jobs, you'll find that you're just cleaning large data sets by running batch scripts, then running more reports that over fit the data in whatever canned shit they have.

If that sounds enjoyable to you, by all means get a masters or phd and do it.

I'm contracting for a fortune 200 company and will not renew unless they offer me something outrageous. But why would they? A monkey can do the job.