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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.

9 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.

      --
      Scott
    2. 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
    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    5. 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.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  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?

  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.