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The One App You Need On Your Resume If You Want a Job At Google
HughPickens.com writes Jim Edwards writes at Business Insider that Google is so large and has such a massive need for talent that if you have the right skills, Google is really enthusiastic to hear from you — especially if you know how to use MatLab, a fourth-generation programming language that allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages, including C, C++, Java, Fortran and Python. The key is that data is produced visually or graphically, rather than in a spreadsheet. According to Jonathan Rosenberg , Google's former senior vice president for product management, being a master of statistics is probably your best way into Google right now and if you want to work at Google, make sure you can use MatLab. Big data — how to create it, manipulate it, and put it to good use — is one of those areas in which Google is really enthusiastic about. The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the successful business, regardless of its size. Rosenberg says that "my quote about statistics that I didn't use but often do is, 'Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it the samurai.'"
I used the word "app" long before it was corrupted by Angry Birds and the like.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
App is short for application, don't get your panties in a wad.
I work at a scientific institute and the license costs of Matlab quickly explode if you need something beyond basic functionality. Since we work on the public's money, we haven't bought into Matlab.
Almost by itself, all scientists and engineers standardized on Python and NumPy/SciPy/Matplotlib. There's a couple of people using Octave, the open source Matlab alternative, but that's very limited right now.
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Or a gigantic application, like Photoshop or MATLAB, that sits in your "Applications" folder. Have you guys never heard of the term "killer app"??? Am I that old?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, not as a statistician, but I do have an interest in statistics, subscribe to internal stats discussion mailing lists, and occasionally talk to Google statisticians.)
R syntax is a lot better. In Matlab, the dimensions of a 3D array are Y,X,Z. That's just one of the many papercuts that makes Matlab difficult and unintuitive to use. R makes a hell of a lot more sense to me.
From what I can see R is a lot more heavily used in Google than Matlab. The article's focus on Matlab is odd. Personally, I mostly use Mathematica. That's less because it's ideal (I haven't learned R so I can't compare, really) than because I already know it.
That said, Google definitely is interested in people who can extract knowledge from data, using whatever tools.
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I've used Matlab academically for about half a year now, and that most anybody (but for scientists and mathematicians operating solely on huge numeric matrices, maybe) uses it is rather shocking to me. The only good thing I can really say about Matlab is that it's made me a better programmer in _other_ languages. Sometimes when you're forced to do something so horribly wrong, the right way of doing it leaps out at you. It's like being forced to ride a unicycle, and suddenly realizing why the motorcycle was invented. Not to say that it doesn't have some very advanced features; it's not a simple beast by any means and -can- do some amazing stuff, but it seems to do them so.. weirdly, and often ridiculously slowly, that it's got that crufty feeling of legacy software with stuff just stapled on all over it.
I'm hopeful about http://www.julialang.org/ the Julia language project and think it's worth at least keeping an eye on in the future.