5 ms·

•Can you walk away from a problem when the solution is “good enough,” are you able to switch between tasks or problems with relative ease? Are you OK with simpl

• denzil_correa 10y ago
  A lot of things in the industry are built via hacks where good enough is good enough. The goal is not to satiate curiosity but to generate business value. This does not equate to lack of pride, just a different goal.
  • M_Grey 10y ago
    Yeah, like the IoT. I'm sorry, but we've reached the point where that level of blithe pursuit of a "different goal" is becoming destructive on a broad scale.
• hyperbovine 10y ago
  A lot of successful academics I know (including mathematicians) operate on similar principles. Not everybody embraces the Gowers/Perelman/Zhang model, nor should they.
• laretluval 10y ago
  That is not the intended meaning at all. It can be a great point of pride and skill to find a solution that is as good as possible subject to complexity and time constraints that do not exist in academia.
  • M_Grey 10y ago
    And how often does that pride last once you see the application that work is put to? At least if you do good math, you can take pride in that.
    • tempodox 10y ago
      It's just a tool. Don't connect aesthetics or morals with its production.
      • M_Grey 10y ago
        The problem is that following that, you become a tool as well.
• ecesena 10y ago
  I think in academia you have the same issues, maybe not to deliver a product but to deliver papers. You get use to the good enough and moving to the next thing, and you're constantly switching between projects, students, students projects... I haven't seen much diff in academia and work, except naming the same thing differently.
• jknoepfler 10y ago
  I'm sorry, what? Being a good engineer in the real world means building quality solutions within time and cost constraints. It's a craft. One can be a good engineer and have both pride and curiosity. You also need humility and the ability to put your customer's needs ahead of your ego. I mean, by all means open up a little boutique data science consultancy that charges three orders of magnitude more for a solution that can't be updated by anyone without a ph.d and only beats an out of the box svm by .1%, where you put your pride and curiosity (your vanity) first. You might even find some suckers to patronize you, but man... I must be misunderstanding you because that is the most clueless and entitled thing I've read in days. 98% of the time data science customers actually just want some basic statistical insights into their data to make better informed decisions. If you aren't willing to help with that, and also can't find a research group to take you in (to work on their projects) and also can't bootstrap your own startup, then yes, stay in academia.
  • M_Grey 10y ago
    We're... not talking about engineers though.
    • jknoepfler 10y ago
      A data scientist is an engineer.
      • M_Grey 10y ago
        "Mathematicians becoming data scientists..." At best you're talking about a career change, at worst you're talking about a watered-down version of your intended career.
        • stale2002 10y ago
          A watered down version of your career that pays 3 times as much, working on problems that will actually affect people's lives.
• stared 10y ago
  Well, I went from academia (theoretical physics) to data science, and "good enough" solutions is exactly the thing I like the most. That is - things that rather solve a concrete problem (given all constraints, including: dirty data, finite time, understanding the needs of clients) rather that have a pure and beautiful, but utterly useless for practical purposes, theorem to prove. But sure, tastes do vary.
  • kochthesecond 10y ago
    Haha, my buddy is in numerical physics. His ideas of good enough is never touching my codebase. He is smart though, and is starting to get why we have build systems and test coverage ;)
• laughfactory 10y ago
  This summarizes real world data science really well, in my experience.