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Data Science is America's Hottest Job (bloomberg.com)

Posted by msmash on from the feeds-and-speeds dept.

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.

26 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. The key to Data Sience. by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    On a SQL based server if you do a left inner or and outer join on an other table, you can use logic to connect two data elements together.

    Quite honestly that is all that I see Data Scientist consultants do. Then they make a graph of the data and get paid big bucks. Vs. our poor schlubs who are not called Data Scientists who do the same thing, and get yelled at for asking the same questions.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:The key to Data Sience. by schematix · · Score: 3, Funny

      You forgot they add a GROUP BY and ORDER BY clause too. There's where the real money is at.

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      Scott
    2. Re:The key to Data Sience. by Gilgaron · · Score: 1

      The PivotTables impress more than just a regular Excel chart, especially if you include lots of unnecessary data slicers for them to poke at.

    3. Re:The key to Data Sience. by ctilsie242 · · Score: 1

      At a previous job, I was using a splunk app (hasn't been updated since 2014) to get hockey scores for my boss for his daily dashboard readout. Supposedly being able to write a bunch of stuff to throw people a report gleaned from Splunk or an ELK stack is big business. However, it is something a sysadmin winds up doing often, just as one does SQL stuff for reporting as well.

    4. Re:The key to Data Sience. by ranton · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I hold the title of a "Data Analytics Manager", I don't get paid even 1/2 of what this article shows, and yes -- you are completely correct.

      In fairness, there is a huge difference between what nearly all companies call "Data Analytics" and the Data Science jobs making $300k+. My wife is also a data analytics manager (not her exact title, but close enough), and she makes just over a third that amount. A significant portion of the job is very similar, such as cleaning data sets and doing the business analysis necessary to know what questions to ask of the data, but the actual analysis performed by data scientists requires significantly more mathematical rigor (at least for the highly paid ones, not just the ones inflating their title).

      My wife's job is still very complex and takes a high level of skill (like most jobs which pay $100k+) but it certainly doesn't require a PhD in Mathematics, or even for her to be good at math (she isn't). She never needs to provide a range of estimates or confidence intervals; her estimates have more to do with intuition and experience over formulas.

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      -- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
    5. Re:The key to Data Sience. by datavirtue · · Score: 1

      Most of the "Data Scientist" positions could be filled by training existing data engineers or DBAs. You need one data scientist for every ten data engineers. If you hire a Data Scientist without having competent data engineering team that understands the strategy (you do have an informed strategy don't you?) just prepare to look stupid wasting a shit-ton of money.

      --
      I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
    6. Re:The key to Data Sience. by jythie · · Score: 2

      Eh, that is a bit like saying all programmers do is type stuff into an IDE, hit 'run', and show off that the thing compiled. Getting paid big bucks is not about making one or two pretty graphs, but about taking lots of data, figuring out which pieces can be pulled together for what insights, then structuring those insights into an actionable narrative that consumers of the reports can then turn around and do things with. The best paid ones probably do not even interact with the data directly, but have data engineers doing the heavy lifting itself.

    7. Re:The key to Data Sience. by datavirtue · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Your story is common. Business realizes they are not using data and feel they are letting something slip by. The usual reason is that some other exec friend asked what they were doing with Data Analytics and they got embarrassed because they didn't even know anything about it so they damn near panic and demand we hire some data scientists. Yeah, businesses in 2018 are still run like this. (Same thing happens with the "Cloud.")

      What they really need is to establish sound data analysis using the skills you pointed out (consolidate and standardize data access). Once you max out that avenue you have a sound basis to think about talking with "Data Scientists."

      --
      I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
    8. Re:The key to Data Sience. by godrik · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    9. Re:The key to Data Sience. by garcia · · Score: 1

      Maybe you should have been modded as "Funny", instead? Because, as a Data Engineer who works side by side with Data Science, I can absolutely guarantee you, in many cases, they are not very good at doing anything at all in SQL; they are way more into pre-built R and/or Python packages to do their work.

      The real fucking heroes are the Data Engineers (ETL guys for you old schoolers) who are doing the operational pipelining of the data flows in and out of the models built in isolation by Data Scientists.

    10. Re:The key to Data Sience. by FilmedInNoir · · Score: 1

      Fawk! I'm changing my self appointed job title to Senior Data Scientist Block Chain Crypto Programmer.

      --
      Sig. Sig. Sputnik
    11. Re:The key to Data Sience. by garcia · · Score: 1

      Depends on where you live, I guess; however, here in Minneapolis, you should expect to make ~125K for DE/DS role if you have >7 years experience.

      Most of the people coming on to my team, straight out of undergrad, make ~$60-70K and are pushing $90K within 2-3 years.

    12. Re:The key to Data Sience. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      On a SQL based server if you do a left inner or and outer join on an other table, you can use logic to connect two data elements together.

      Quite honestly that is all that I see Data Scientist consultants do. Then they make a graph of the data and get paid big bucks. Vs. our poor schlubs who are not called Data Scientists who do the same thing, and get yelled at for asking the same questions.

      Says the guy who can't even spell science correctly.

      Did you even RTFA? Even the summary states that sentiment analysis is one of the main reasons data science is hot. A goddamn join isn't going to help you classify a document.

    13. Re: The key to Data Sience. by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      The field is more than Table Joins, but the Data Scientists who come in and charge Thousands of dollars a day, tend to be just doing simple DB stuff and use the fancy title that some just make up, so they can get the Data Scientist money.

      True Data Scientist do a lot more, but they are not the ones most businesses hired.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    14. Re:The key to Data Sience. by rtb61 · · Score: 2

      Nope, what they are doing is confusing the term, data scientist with data analyst. Get away from the silliness that writing data formulas are all that flash, what is important is knowing what data is important, not the data formulas to dig it out. So the idea of the composite of a very experienced data analysts, where is it their broad knowledge across a broad range of subjects that gives them insight into valuable data and that bit of knowledge that allows them to write data formulas. It is knowing what data is important and what data can be ignored, that is key, not the data base design or it's data formulas.

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      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    15. Re:The key to Data Sience. by doom · · Score: 1

      Eh, that is a bit like saying all programmers do is type stuff into an IDE, hit 'run', and show off that the thing compiled.

      *ssssh...*

  2. This week's most popular job is... by The+Fat+Bastard · · Score: 2

    So making $1M+ as an AI researcher is old hat now?

    1. Re:This week's most popular job is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      The hottest job seems to be Presidential apologist anyway. They hire more of those mealy mouthed lying traitors every day to replace the ones going to prison.

    2. Re:This week's most popular job is... by novakyu · · Score: 1

      Eh. But to do that, you need years of education and training. Being a "data scientist" could be done after one summer boot camp!

      I imagine data scientists are like consultants: a huge range in value added (or subtracted) by any particular "data scientist".

  3. Web Master Flashback! by rockmuelle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Web Master was the hottest job 20 years ago. Right up until every realized that the position was better filled via a mix traditional IT techs and software engineers.

    Data science will go the same way, but it will be software engineers and statisticians that replace the current crop of bootcamp trained data "scientists". (actually, all real data science shops already do it that way... the market will correct)

  4. uh by cascadingstylesheet · · Score: 2

    finding people who can turn social-media clicks and user-posted photos into monetizable binary code

    I'm immobile because I can't figure out which part of that to gnaw to shreds first.

    1. Re:uh by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      Why? That seemed like the sanest line in the whole summary. That seems like pretty much what most data scientists do.

  5. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  6. What is science? by chthon · · Score: 1

    Posit hypothesis

    Run experiment to validate or reject hypothesis

    So it seems that we now need data scientists to do things with data that were supposed to be done by OLAP systems, i.e. find correlations between dimensions that were not supposed to be trivial? Data mining?

  7. Here come the bootcamps by wyattstorch516 · · Score: 1

    https://flatironschool.com/pro...

  8. Isn't AI the hottest job? Bubble 2.0 baby! by ErichTheRed · · Score: 1

    Am I the only one who sees some slight similarities to the First Dotcom Bubble? Obviously data analysis is a very useful skill to have, but I think it's going to get to the point where anyone running a sanitized data set through an R or Python package will be a Data Scientist. We've already got the AI, Blockchain and Data Science bootcamps cranking people out now! In fact, I thought I read the other day that some survey proclaimed AI as the hottest job.

    I think this bubble is going to last a very long time and take much longer to fully inflate. If you've been paying attention, it's only the monumentally stupid VC startups that are failing so far...everything else is kicking along. You have hundreds of copycat "product box" subscription services, data-mining apps built on top of social media APIs, "Uber for X," "Tinder for Y", etc. IMO, cloud computing is one of the reasons they can stick around much longer. These startups just have to make enough to pay the AWS/Azure/GCP bill every month, rent a small office (maybe,) and pay a bunch of MacBook toting hipster full stack developers and the executive crew...not build out a million-dollar data center every couple years.