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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.'"
Ugh, this reads like a job ad.
When I moved from Matlab to Python three years ago, I saw a massive speed increase of my methods. Also I no longer have to decide whether or not to shell out more cash for the statistics package, it's all there!
Looking back at my old Matlab code also makes me cringe a bit about the syntax of that language.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai.
So, data is a weapon used against us?
And those that wield it are our new feudal lords?
At least we know how Googles Senior management really feels about things.
MatLab is an old, crufty, feature-creeped script engine that I try to hold myself away from as much as I can. As a researcher and academic (got up to post-doc), Matlab is indeed ubiquitous in academia, but it's mostly due to entrenched positions. I see fewer and fewer people using Matlab these days, and that's a good thing.
Matlab is by all means not a fourth-generation programming language: it is procedural just like Fortran, which it supplanted in academia, but it does not have type-checking as C, it does not have OO support as C++, it does not do away with semicolons as end-of-line markers like Python; true, it has some advance features like OO and some functional programming, but (almost) nobody uses them, and most Matlab code is a horrible cruft made by self-not-so-well-taught academics. There is nothing in Matlab you cannot do better in Python with scipy, numpy, matplotlib and pandas. Or with declarative PLs like Modelica.
Matlab is also known for outrageous prices, leveraging on the fact their customer base are universities with big pockets and small administrative brains, and large corporations: they split their code base in many small chunks, and for each you need to pay more and more: as the saying goes, In Matlab you cannot do shit unless you buy a licence for the Toilet Paper toolbox.
Long story short: Matlab is the Perl of academia.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Really, calling it an app is like calling a Ferrari Enzo a bicycle. Matlab is a tool that is used for data analysis; when it is described as an "app" in the modern sense it is being classified with angry birds and other such smartphone rubbish.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Python has obsolesced Matlab. There are even Matlab to Python cross-compilers and packages that allow Matlab to work like a Python library.
Agree. I use Python with open source packages like scipy, numpy, matplotlib and others, to achieve almost the same thing as Matlab.
Also the language (Python) is much cleaner.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
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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I know several really capable people that left Google, because of bureaucracy, corporate greed, incompetence, and general lack of vision. Google has become an ordinary large enterprise. And they do not even pay that well.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Octave is a hugely better option. I once used 128 instances of Octave on a cluster to run something that the computer center only had 5 matlab licenses for. Running matlab on a cluster is just stupid.
Oh, and if you care, Octave is as compatible with matlab as matlab is with itself. Every time you upgrade matlab you have to deal with broken things. Octave is not bug-for-bug compatible with matlab; it's better. Hugely better.
1) By the time you learn it, it won't be hot anymore.
2) It's all about experience. Don't take my word for it, look at the job ads. Learn something all you want, if you don't have five years experience in it, your knowledge is useless.
3) These articles about what's "hot" are just standard corporate propaganda. IT employers always want people chasing their tails, studying everything, just so they have a larger labor pool.
4) Don't get constantly distracted trying to learn what is supposedly "hot" at the moment, just learn anything useful, and be very good at it. Being very good at anything useful is far more valuable than a superficial knowledge of the latest fad.
5) These articles don't tell you anything more than they tell everybody else in the world. Learning whatever is not going to give you any competitive advantage.
All JMHO, of course.
Disclosure: I worked in IT for over 30 years. I have held several jobs, at several companies. I have been through the hiring process a lot.
Publishing this just while we have a poll on favorite clickbaits, how appropriate!
"Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it the samurai."
That's the douchiest way of saying "knowledge is power" that I have ever heard.
No, they can and will drill both of those things into your head. What they are looking for is healthy people who are willing to die for whatever it is our military asks them to do.
What is lost in the article is that a Mathematics PhD or at least information science as part of a CS or EE course, is probably the ACTUAL skill that google would like. You can pick up Matlab if you have been using other tools to do the function, but it's a shitload harder to pick up the math and relevant algorithms, research and hive knowledge.
Statistics and Logistics were a major part of my CS degree way back in the late 80's, more so than writing programs. If you think the only place statistics are used in tech companies is in marketing material then I have to conclude you have never worked as a corporate plumber and have no idea what they do. The core reason developers have always attracted good salaries at large corporations is that they can sift through mountains of data and tell the managers something about their business that they didn't know.
I'm not that far from retirement but that job will disappear in the near future, the technology in IBM's Watson will "democratise" data analysis in the same way the PC has "democratised" programming. Experts will have a "conversation" with the computer in which man and machine will both "learn" something, Google style search engines will look as quaint as a "ready reckoner" book of maths tables. And yes, Watson relies heavily on statistics, it doesn't actually give you an "answer" it gives a range of answers with an associated probability. Sounds kinda flakey but the fact that it can beat the world's top trivia buffs in an open ended problem domain is old news.
When it won the Jeopardy championship a few years ago it needed 2 tons of air-conditioning alone and was an exclusive toy for IBM devs. Today it fits on a "pizza box" server and IBM have recently opened the API to the public.
Disclaimer: Worked for IBM in the 90's, not shilling, just my personal opinion that "cognitive computing" may turn out to be more significant to human history than anything else that's happened since WW2.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.