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I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few cour

I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).

ithilglin909 9y ago
I'm just curious -- where do you think the puck will be? I've had a number of younger acquaintances ask for career advice. Pursuing some kind of data science seems like an obviously smart direction now, but I've wondered if this, as well as traditional CS career paths, may be in danger of becoming over-saturated areas, now that everyone views them as sure paths to a job that pays well.
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  i think there is a natural barrier for these paths being too hard and too mathy for most people. people have known for decades that engineering is a good path.
  - resolaibohp 9y ago
    Yep, a lot of the people who want to get into it run away when they find out you need to know how to code and understand the math. For some reason there is this idea that it is easy money.
- jamestimmins 9y ago
  I simply mean in terms of the availability of online courses. Eventually there will be harder CS courses online. While there's been enormous movement in this direction in even the last 2 years, there's still a lot of room for growth and improvement.
- itronitron 9y ago
  By its nature data science work is very undefined. There is not yet a widely established design path for data science as there is for software development. The risk for someone starting their career in data science is that they will end up in an organization that doesn't know how to data science. So I'd recommend steering young folk to larger teams that have PhD level Statisticians.
- proverbialbunny 9y ago
  On the tech side front end or data science both seem like good options. Companies are need a store front, so front end work will continue for a while, until it is super easy for any joe to make a professional website. Data Science looks promising too, because it is automating and solving problems that previously could not be done. However, outside of tech the world still needs skilled blue collar workers. For example, I don't see carpenters being automated away any time soon. I hear some of those jobs pay better than tech work too.
- domnomnom 9y ago
  math is the secret weapon here. Cybersecurity, data science, programming
resolaibohp 9y ago
I have also found this interesting. What I don't understand is that the amount of data science jobs are no where near the levels that people make it seem. I am not sure where all these people will end up working if they want to be a data scientist. There is not a need to hire huge teams of data scientists like you might for dev roles, it doesn't scale the same way.
- linuxftw 9y ago
  Every graduate that doesn't find a high paying job in the field is an excellent candidate for the next level of education. After you have given a university hundreds of thousands of dollars and a decade-plus of your life, you will then be ready to teach the next crop of students.
  - linkmotif 9y ago
    It’s a pyramid sceme you can get in on with financing.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    > Every graduate that doesn't find a high paying job in the field is an excellent candidate for the next level of education. 1. You really think Berkeley's top-ranked PhD program is recruiting people who couldn't find jobs? No. Not only can 100% of successful top-tier PhD applicants find jobs, 100% of them are strong candidates for the top echelon on entry-level jobs. If you disagree, go look up the people in Berkeley's CS PhD program. Point out a single person you think didn't turn down mid-100s job offers to attend Berkeley. Getting into one of these top-5-to-10 PhD programs is no small thing... 2. MOOCs aren't PhD programs and in nearly all cases aren't designed to feed into PhD programs. 3. Finally, at least in CS, at least for the moment, educators are in extremely high demand. And again, at least for CS, that demand isn't being manufactured by the academy.
    - tomrod 9y ago
      Close to 100%, but not 100%.
electricslpnsld 9y ago
> I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects Is it that there are more courses in data science relative to other topics, or is just more marketing around these classes? It costs Berekely essentially nothing to pump out some press around the release of course materials in data science.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
MIT open courseware has a bunch of classes related to traditional CS topics. Also just searching universities you can find some. Data Science is the new hip class and it’s just very aggressively marketed. The other one being marketed heavily is intro to coding .
- jamestimmins 9y ago
  Good to know about OCW. Are there often videos as well as assignments? My issue in the past was that they often didn't have many of the teaching resources. Intro to coding is a fascinating one. From a marketing/business standpoint it makes sense, but 3-4 it was extremely frustrating to see dozens of intro coding courses, but practically nothing for intermediate programmers. Thankfully we're past that point for the most part.
  - zitterbewegung 9y ago
    It depends on the class but they have videos and assignments there .
- globuous 9y ago
  Their computer security class is amazing. All lectures, notes, labs, quizzes etc: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-858-computer-systems-security-fall-2014/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...
- amrx101 9y ago
  I think all MOOCs have traditional CS courses but marketing hype is on Data Science and ML. I remember doing Tim Roughgarden(StanFord) Algorithm course on Coursera. Loved it.
QML 9y ago
I think it’s because data science has a more immediate, broader applicability than computer science. Not everybody needs to know how to program a full application; but they should be able to load in a dataset and statistically analyze it. Looking at the type of people taking Data 8 compared to CS61A (the introductory programming course), I would say the former is a fairly diverse crowd (political science majors, economics majors, biology majors, etc.) It is also a possibility that Data Science is an easier topic to learn than Computer Science, and thus more popular.
- itronitron 9y ago
  It might be more popular as many data science courses use Python and therefore students don't have to get their code to compile. Seriously though, I think people are drawn to data science out of a desire to create stories with some underlying support (data/evidence) in order to influence policy or business decisions.
  - Ar-Curunir 9y ago
    61A also uses Python.
- heedlessly3 9y ago
  >It is also a possibility that Data Science is an easier topic to learn than Computer Science, and thus more popular. This might seem so due to mainstream marketing. But that's not true. To be truly good at Data Science, you must know a chunk of Computer Science fundamentals and Statistics
fma 9y ago
Because it sounds cool...I remember when I was applying for college (2001), nanotechnology and biomedical engineering was all the rage. Glad I stuck with electrical engineering.
- banned1 9y ago
  I thought biomedical engineering still has a lot of potential to offer?
  - fma 9y ago
    The people I knew that majored in biomedical engineering went on to med school... Probably one of those areas that is always in the news and science magazine but still too early to revolutionize life. I remember when Dolly was cloned and we would have a whole new industry...
    - banned1 9y ago
      Evidently I am ignorant based on comments from people who are obviously better informed than me. What is the field that is going to revolutionize curing diseases through genetics engineering etc?
  - swedishfish 9y ago
    My friend who majored in biomed kept getting passed over during her job search. Turns out all the biomed companies just wanted to hire mechanical engineers. (She did eventually find a job in her field.) I guess it's analogous to the data science degrees popping up today. Will be interesting to see if it ends up as a fad degree or a legitimate career path.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      My impression (as someone who was once very interested in biomedical engineering) was that it was always mostly mechanical engineering plus some bio/chem and teaming up with doctors. I didn't end up going that route but I got an ME from a school where a number of mechanical engineering professors worked with the affiliated hospital on projects.
ucarion 9y ago
You're talking only about the public + free MOOC stuff, right? I think it's reasonable for that to be biased toward less specialized stuff. Internally, Berkeley definitely isn't based toward the intro-level stuff. Quite the opposite. But the most polished, rehearsed, mass-manufactured classes are certainly the gigantic intro-level ones everyone takes.
Ar-Curunir 9y ago
Our computer security course at Berkeley regularly attracts 600+ students. Berkeley is doing fine in terms of traditional course offerings.
- jamestimmins 9y ago
  I meant in terms of online courses. Would love to see that class put online.
  - Ar-Curunir 9y ago
    All the materials (except lecture videos) are available online; just google CS161 Berkeley.
soziawa 9y ago
It says fastest growing course. At my university it's also the fastest growing course. It grew from 0 to 50 students in the last semester.
trendnet 9y ago
GaTech has a lot of good MOOC Computer System courses.
- jamestimmins 9y ago
  Yeah they seem to be one of the few that's really leading the way here.
Socketopp 9y ago
All these courses in data science ain't gonna solve science biggest mystery, that is consciousness. Too bad we don't focus on that. /Cognitive scientist
- ghaff 9y ago
  We are starting to see a bit of a pushback although it's hard to discern amongst all the hype. There's some recognition that deep learning is just one technique that happened to pop (to use Rodney Brooks' term) for a variety of reasons but that we haven't made huge progress in cognitive science and other fields. Deep learning is the current shiny toy but I suspect we'll find it isn't actually sufficient for a lot of things we want to do and we'll run into a wall a lot of people aren't expecting.
- JBSay 9y ago
  That's why it's called data science not cognitive science. Duh!
sigi45 9y ago
This is a general issue i have seen as well. We live in 2018 and there is no open source course for everything. Instead there are probably 10-30k universities who have similar courses and professors who give the same lecture every year. They get paid often enough by countries to create and do those courses. In germany most of our unversities are paid by all of us germans anyway. And what do you find online? Always the starter verion like 101 computer science or videos with bad audio or video, no proper exercises, no solution helper etc. Nothing. You have to go to different sites to sometimes pay or sometimes not. there are no local locations to meet up with people. There should be a global initiative for global free and open access learning. Sponsored and supported by companies and countries. Build upon a core of a knowledge graph based on topics or 'snippets of knowledge'. Like for example: math -> add -> sub Something like 'The Map of Mathematics' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y) And when you wanna get the global accepted math 101 level, you have to take specific topics / snippets. And those snippets can than be filled with different people who are making a lecture for that topic and you can choose whom you like more or who is better in explaining it to you. What do i do instead? I ask around for the lecture scripts because they are always behind a simple password protected area or have multiple links to different pages of different universietses who offer different courses for free as videos for there students in sometimes/often bad quality and / or bad video players etc. It sucks and this is stupid.
- rmorey 9y ago
  >There should be a global initiative for global free and open access learning. Sponsored and supported by companies and countries. Build upon a core of a knowledge graph based on topics or 'snippets of knowledge'. I like this idea and the framing of it a lot
- dpflan 9y ago
  Have you seen this? Does this meet your criteria/have enough sufficient resources/curriculum? > http://datasciencemasters.org/ http://datasciencemasters.org/
  - sigi45 9y ago

ithilglin909 9y ago

I'm just curious -- where do you think the puck will be? I've had a number of younger acquaintances ask for career advice. Pursuing some kind of data science seems like an obviously smart direction now, but I've wondered if this, as well as traditional CS career paths, may be in danger of becoming over-saturated areas, now that everyone views them as sure paths to a job that pays well.

oculusthrift 9y ago
i think there is a natural barrier for these paths being too hard and too mathy for most people. people have known for decades that engineering is a good path.
- resolaibohp 9y ago
  Yep, a lot of the people who want to get into it run away when they find out you need to know how to code and understand the math. For some reason there is this idea that it is easy money.
jamestimmins 9y ago
I simply mean in terms of the availability of online courses. Eventually there will be harder CS courses online. While there's been enormous movement in this direction in even the last 2 years, there's still a lot of room for growth and improvement.
itronitron 9y ago
By its nature data science work is very undefined. There is not yet a widely established design path for data science as there is for software development. The risk for someone starting their career in data science is that they will end up in an organization that doesn't know how to data science. So I'd recommend steering young folk to larger teams that have PhD level Statisticians.
proverbialbunny 9y ago
On the tech side front end or data science both seem like good options. Companies are need a store front, so front end work will continue for a while, until it is super easy for any joe to make a professional website. Data Science looks promising too, because it is automating and solving problems that previously could not be done. However, outside of tech the world still needs skilled blue collar workers. For example, I don't see carpenters being automated away any time soon. I hear some of those jobs pay better than tech work too.
domnomnom 9y ago
math is the secret weapon here. Cybersecurity, data science, programming

resolaibohp 9y ago

I have also found this interesting. What I don't understand is that the amount of data science jobs are no where near the levels that people make it seem. I am not sure where all these people will end up working if they want to be a data scientist. There is not a need to hire huge teams of data scientists like you might for dev roles, it doesn't scale the same way.

linuxftw 9y ago
Every graduate that doesn't find a high paying job in the field is an excellent candidate for the next level of education. After you have given a university hundreds of thousands of dollars and a decade-plus of your life, you will then be ready to teach the next crop of students.
- linkmotif 9y ago
  It’s a pyramid sceme you can get in on with financing.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  > Every graduate that doesn't find a high paying job in the field is an excellent candidate for the next level of education. 1. You really think Berkeley's top-ranked PhD program is recruiting people who couldn't find jobs? No. Not only can 100% of successful top-tier PhD applicants find jobs, 100% of them are strong candidates for the top echelon on entry-level jobs. If you disagree, go look up the people in Berkeley's CS PhD program. Point out a single person you think didn't turn down mid-100s job offers to attend Berkeley. Getting into one of these top-5-to-10 PhD programs is no small thing... 2. MOOCs aren't PhD programs and in nearly all cases aren't designed to feed into PhD programs. 3. Finally, at least in CS, at least for the moment, educators are in extremely high demand. And again, at least for CS, that demand isn't being manufactured by the academy.
  - tomrod 9y ago
    Close to 100%, but not 100%.

electricslpnsld 9y ago

> I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects Is it that there are more courses in data science relative to other topics, or is just more marketing around these classes? It costs Berekely essentially nothing to pump out some press around the release of course materials in data science.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

MIT open courseware has a bunch of classes related to traditional CS topics. Also just searching universities you can find some. Data Science is the new hip class and it’s just very aggressively marketed. The other one being marketed heavily is intro to coding .

jamestimmins 9y ago
Good to know about OCW. Are there often videos as well as assignments? My issue in the past was that they often didn't have many of the teaching resources. Intro to coding is a fascinating one. From a marketing/business standpoint it makes sense, but 3-4 it was extremely frustrating to see dozens of intro coding courses, but practically nothing for intermediate programmers. Thankfully we're past that point for the most part.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  It depends on the class but they have videos and assignments there .
globuous 9y ago
Their computer security class is amazing. All lectures, notes, labs, quizzes etc: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-858-computer-systems-security-fall-2014/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...
amrx101 9y ago
I think all MOOCs have traditional CS courses but marketing hype is on Data Science and ML. I remember doing Tim Roughgarden(StanFord) Algorithm course on Coursera. Loved it.

QML 9y ago

I think it’s because data science has a more immediate, broader applicability than computer science. Not everybody needs to know how to program a full application; but they should be able to load in a dataset and statistically analyze it. Looking at the type of people taking Data 8 compared to CS61A (the introductory programming course), I would say the former is a fairly diverse crowd (political science majors, economics majors, biology majors, etc.) It is also a possibility that Data Science is an easier topic to learn than Computer Science, and thus more popular.

itronitron 9y ago
It might be more popular as many data science courses use Python and therefore students don't have to get their code to compile. Seriously though, I think people are drawn to data science out of a desire to create stories with some underlying support (data/evidence) in order to influence policy or business decisions.
- Ar-Curunir 9y ago
  61A also uses Python.
heedlessly3 9y ago
>It is also a possibility that Data Science is an easier topic to learn than Computer Science, and thus more popular. This might seem so due to mainstream marketing. But that's not true. To be truly good at Data Science, you must know a chunk of Computer Science fundamentals and Statistics

fma 9y ago

Because it sounds cool...I remember when I was applying for college (2001), nanotechnology and biomedical engineering was all the rage. Glad I stuck with electrical engineering.

banned1 9y ago
I thought biomedical engineering still has a lot of potential to offer?
- fma 9y ago
  The people I knew that majored in biomedical engineering went on to med school... Probably one of those areas that is always in the news and science magazine but still too early to revolutionize life. I remember when Dolly was cloned and we would have a whole new industry...
  - banned1 9y ago
    Evidently I am ignorant based on comments from people who are obviously better informed than me. What is the field that is going to revolutionize curing diseases through genetics engineering etc?
- swedishfish 9y ago
  My friend who majored in biomed kept getting passed over during her job search. Turns out all the biomed companies just wanted to hire mechanical engineers. (She did eventually find a job in her field.) I guess it's analogous to the data science degrees popping up today. Will be interesting to see if it ends up as a fad degree or a legitimate career path.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    My impression (as someone who was once very interested in biomedical engineering) was that it was always mostly mechanical engineering plus some bio/chem and teaming up with doctors. I didn't end up going that route but I got an ME from a school where a number of mechanical engineering professors worked with the affiliated hospital on projects.

ucarion 9y ago

You're talking only about the public + free MOOC stuff, right? I think it's reasonable for that to be biased toward less specialized stuff. Internally, Berkeley definitely isn't based toward the intro-level stuff. Quite the opposite. But the most polished, rehearsed, mass-manufactured classes are certainly the gigantic intro-level ones everyone takes.

Ar-Curunir 9y ago

Our computer security course at Berkeley regularly attracts 600+ students. Berkeley is doing fine in terms of traditional course offerings.

jamestimmins 9y ago
I meant in terms of online courses. Would love to see that class put online.
- Ar-Curunir 9y ago
  All the materials (except lecture videos) are available online; just google CS161 Berkeley.

soziawa 9y ago

It says fastest growing course. At my university it's also the fastest growing course. It grew from 0 to 50 students in the last semester.

trendnet 9y ago

GaTech has a lot of good MOOC Computer System courses.

jamestimmins 9y ago
Yeah they seem to be one of the few that's really leading the way here.

Socketopp 9y ago

All these courses in data science ain't gonna solve science biggest mystery, that is consciousness. Too bad we don't focus on that. /Cognitive scientist

ghaff 9y ago
We are starting to see a bit of a pushback although it's hard to discern amongst all the hype. There's some recognition that deep learning is just one technique that happened to pop (to use Rodney Brooks' term) for a variety of reasons but that we haven't made huge progress in cognitive science and other fields. Deep learning is the current shiny toy but I suspect we'll find it isn't actually sufficient for a lot of things we want to do and we'll run into a wall a lot of people aren't expecting.
JBSay 9y ago
That's why it's called data science not cognitive science. Duh!

sigi45 9y ago

This is a general issue i have seen as well. We live in 2018 and there is no open source course for everything. Instead there are probably 10-30k universities who have similar courses and professors who give the same lecture every year. They get paid often enough by countries to create and do those courses. In germany most of our unversities are paid by all of us germans anyway. And what do you find online? Always the starter verion like 101 computer science or videos with bad audio or video, no proper exercises, no solution helper etc. Nothing. You have to go to different sites to sometimes pay or sometimes not. there are no local locations to meet up with people. There should be a global initiative for global free and open access learning. Sponsored and supported by companies and countries. Build upon a core of a knowledge graph based on topics or 'snippets of knowledge'. Like for example: math -> add -> sub Something like 'The Map of Mathematics' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmJ-4B-mS-Y) And when you wanna get the global accepted math 101 level, you have to take specific topics / snippets. And those snippets can than be filled with different people who are making a lecture for that topic and you can choose whom you like more or who is better in explaining it to you. What do i do instead? I ask around for the lecture scripts because they are always behind a simple password protected area or have multiple links to different pages of different universietses who offer different courses for free as videos for there students in sometimes/often bad quality and / or bad video players etc. It sucks and this is stupid.

rmorey 9y ago
>There should be a global initiative for global free and open access learning. Sponsored and supported by companies and countries. Build upon a core of a knowledge graph based on topics or 'snippets of knowledge'. I like this idea and the framing of it a lot
dpflan 9y ago
Have you seen this? Does this meet your criteria/have enough sufficient resources/curriculum? > http://datasciencemasters.org/ http://datasciencemasters.org/
- sigi45 9y ago