Slashdot Mirror
Data Science is America's Hottest Job (bloomberg.com)
Anonymous readers share a report: It turns out that even in the wake of Facebook's privacy scandal and other big-data blunders, finding people who can turn social-media clicks and user-posted photos into monetizable binary code is among the biggest challenges facing U.S. industry. People with data science bona fides are among the most sought-after professionals in business, with some data science Ph.Ds commanding as much as $300,000 or more from consulting firms.
Job postings for data scientists rose 75 percent from January 2015 to January 2018 at Indeed.com, while job searches for data scientist roles rose 65 percent. A growing specialty is "sentiment analysis," or finding a way to quantify how many tweets are trashing your company or praising it. A typical data scientist job pays about $119,000 at the midpoint of salaries and rises to $168,000 at the 95th percentile, according to staffing agency Robert Half Technology.
Job postings for data scientists rose 75 percent from January 2015 to January 2018 at Indeed.com, while job searches for data scientist roles rose 65 percent. A growing specialty is "sentiment analysis," or finding a way to quantify how many tweets are trashing your company or praising it. A typical data scientist job pays about $119,000 at the midpoint of salaries and rises to $168,000 at the 95th percentile, according to staffing agency Robert Half Technology.
If you can train an existing DBA to be a data scientist quickly, then you don't really need a data scientist. Data science is about modeling complex phenomenon. It is about building statistical models, analyzing statistical significance, connecting pieces of an incomplete puzzle.
It really has little in common with what a DBA usually does. Yes, they'll both write programs. Yes, they'll both use a bunch of data. Yes, they probably both took calculus II. But the commonalities stop here.
A physicist, MD, algorithmician, or economist would probably be closer to being data scientists than a system oriented DBA.