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Demand and Salaries For Data Scientists Continue To Climb (ieee.org)
Data-science job openings are expanding faster than the number of technologists looking for them, says job-search firm Indeed. From a report: Back in August, a LinkedIn analysis concluded that the United States is facing a significant shortage of data scientists, a big change from a surplus in 2015. Last week, job-search firm Indeed reported that its data indicates the shortage is getting worse: While more job seekers are interested in data-science jobs, the number of job postings from employers has been rising faster than the number of interested applicants.
According to Indeed, job postings for data scientists as a share of all postings were up 29 percent in December 2018 compared with December 2017, while searches were only up around 14 percent. "The bargaining power in data science remains with the job seekers," Andrew Flowers, Indeed economist, stated in a press release. [...] Salaries for data scientists are up as well. Average salary in the area surrounding Houston, which topped the 2018 list when adjusted for the cost of living, climbed 16.5 percent since 2017, while the average salary in the San Francisco Bay Area, No. 2 on the adjusted list, jumped 13.7 percent over Indeed's 2017 numbers.
According to Indeed, job postings for data scientists as a share of all postings were up 29 percent in December 2018 compared with December 2017, while searches were only up around 14 percent. "The bargaining power in data science remains with the job seekers," Andrew Flowers, Indeed economist, stated in a press release. [...] Salaries for data scientists are up as well. Average salary in the area surrounding Houston, which topped the 2018 list when adjusted for the cost of living, climbed 16.5 percent since 2017, while the average salary in the San Francisco Bay Area, No. 2 on the adjusted list, jumped 13.7 percent over Indeed's 2017 numbers.
No doubt the big money will be in Data Scientist training programs.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
why must tech nerds rebrand everything?
Can you make more than $50,000? Asking for a friend...
I keep applying for these jobs, all of which I am completely qualified for, but the computer sees that my college degree is from 1987 and instantly deletes my resume.
I'm assuming this is yet another Bay area problem, where once against the mistake is being made in thinking that the Bay area = whole world.
We got taken over by a major US company earlier this year that's known in probably just about every US household and has a lot of data. Within 3 weeks of take over they made a bunch of redundancy and scrapped a bunch of projects. Fortunately I wasn't made redundant but they scrapped our market leading product that was built on the back of effective data science instead deciding to roll out their shitty product that was at least 5 - 10 years behind (because the US is backwards when it comes to financial services). They moved all of us with data science experience onto other non-data science general development work, so we all fucked off elsewhere to other companies. We're not doing data science anymore because no one wants it, and besides, there's no pay premium for it precisely because no one understands it yet outside of a handful of areas (i.e. SF bay area).
As such, American companies clearly aren't that desperate for data scientists if they're willing scrap not just wildly successful products built off the back of data science in favour of ineffective dumb legacy products, but also those with data science experience as well.
I agree with the premise that data scientists are important, they most definitely have the ability to take a company from being an "also-ran" to being market leader in no time at all, but I disagree that there can be any kind of meaningful global shortage for the simple fact that the vast majority of the world doesn't understand the benefits yet to even be looking or to understand why they'd want to hire them.
I'd love to do more data science work precisely because the two companies I've worked for that have let me put my skills to use have ended up gaining an absolutely colossal advantage over the competition, but opportunities for data science are few and far between outside the Bay area in pretty much the entire rest of the world.
The biggest culprit I can think of is that most government contractors are big on direct recruiting. For example, you often hear employees bring someone they know or a recruiter gets a resume and a manager will say "cool, we'll open a req." Then the req gets quickly filled and disappears.
True, it really means "people who know statistics".
But more than that, it also means people who know statistics but also how to work with numerical computations that deal with statistics.. stat understanding alone is far from the whole story.
I would say it's probably more like a very specialized programming knowledge, than a statistician. And that is why supply is short, because the supply of people who know something like R well is smaller than people who have a good understanding of statistics... it also explains why a shortage remains, because as we all know programming is kind of hard and not something you can easily train anyone into to do well at.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Companies are accumulating massive amounts of data but don't have anyone to tell them what it means. Maybe this will one day result in someone asking why they accumulate the data in the first place.
What will the next flavor of the month be.
Have Math and CS grad degrees, some emphasis in AI, years of experience with SVMs, gradient descent opt, etc. Plus, I can actually code. No bites in the job market. I call bullshit.
For Americans, not so much.
Do they science the shit out of data?
I have zero sympathy for these companies, who probably have no problem sending executives to management training retreats, support getting university degrees, and the like. They seem to not understand they could do the same for existing employees with suitable internal IT, Engineering, Math, people who are interested, have a "knack", and build their own data analysis function. Do this the right way, and you could grow a revenue-generating department that can sell their expertise to other businesses, not to mention have a company attracts good people as job candidates for that skill, and others.
The goal of this sort of corporate funded news-ad is to goad people into entering the field to drive down employee leverage. A field is "creating more jobs than employees" precisely until the market is so overcrowded salaries plummet. It's probably a good time to avoid Data Science if this sort of news-ad is running.
the job would pay minimum wage. Maybe less (they could "Uberify" it).
...
Being a Data Scientist means math. Lots and lots of math. Really hard math like the kind very few people can do. Now, if you fully supported students you'd probably have plenty of them. But that means taxes for the wealthy, and we can't have that. After all, a 70% marginal tax rate means a guy making $10/hr only keeps $3 a day, right? So we'll import H1-Bs. Lots of them, and you'll pay out of pocket for your kid's college or go into debt like crazy. Because we're all about pulling the ladder up behind us
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