4 ms·

>If you fit that bill you can probably get a role paying $95-120k just about anywhere in the US. You'll wrangle data, make pipelines, build dashboards and occas

by antt 8y ago

>If you fit that bill you can probably get a role paying $95-120k just about anywhere in the US. You'll wrangle data, make pipelines, build dashboards and occasionally deploy a model or two when the planets align. If you expect to pay that little to anyone who knows the above to any degree you will have a bad time. A number of projects I have joined absolutely look like someone treated them as a way to learn the technology before moving onto better paying jobs, leaving the business with a terrible mess that's largely unfixable without a rewrite. You're better off hiring one developer that knows what they are doing at above market rates than three who don't for the same price.

BeetleB 8y ago
>If you expect to pay that little to anyone who knows the above to any degree you will have a bad time. I believe you misunderstood his point. The $95-120K figure is for people who do not do ground breaking research. Anecdotally, I know people who get hired for data science who are doing very little data sciencey stuff (a bit of data manipulation/slicing and lots of plots - almost no actual ML). These people should not get paid more than a typical SW developer, and decent SW developers should get paid more.
- antt 8y ago
  > - SQL - AWS/Azure - Tableau/Power BI/Other BI tools - Python/R - Increasingly Hadoop/Spark Is above and beyond a typical SW developer. That's three languages and two dsls. If you expect that on a 120k salary, you will be what you pay for, e.g. a code monkey living on peanuts.
  - BeetleB 8y ago
    First, I don't think he meant they expect you to know all of these - just a subset. Second, most people I know who know R or Pandas or other Python numerical stuff (NumPy/SciPy) are horrible programmers. They're good at numerical work - but that doesn't translate to good coding skills. The bar is not that high to know it. It's somewhat similar with AWS/Hadoop. Most people I know have taken learn these (online training, in person classes, etc) with very basic SW skills. I don't doubt expert programmers exist who know these technologies - I'm just pointing out that it's not that hard to learn some of these. Plenty of people learn these without knowing much SW. To be a good SW developer takes a lot more. >If you expect that on a 120k salary, you will be what you pay for, e.g. a code monkey living on peanuts. You must be in the Bay Area. A 120K salary is above the median for SW developers for most of the country, and grants them a great lifestyle: Big house, two cars, vacation travel, etc. Hardly "living on peanuts". The GP was clear he was not talking about the Bay area: >If you fit that bill you can probably get a role paying $95-120k just about anywhere in the US. Finally, the point is: If you studied actual Machine Learning, he is pointing out that these jobs are mostly not that, and you will just do a boring job.
    - antt 8y ago
      >You must be in the Bay Area. A 120K salary is above the median for SW developers for most of the country, and grants them a great lifestyle: Big house, two cars, vacation travel, etc. Hardly "living on peanuts". I'm not in the US currently. I have worked with teams in New York in finance and the wages expected were multiples of 120k. Likewise in London and Honk Kong.
      - checkyoursudo 8y ago
        So, some of the most expensive cities in the world. How about the likes of Minneapolis or Frankfurt or Jakarta?
      - BeetleB 8y ago
        Most of the US is not California or the NE. When someone says "most", they mean the outliers are not included. When one says "most Americans can't point out Egypt on the map", it's rather pointless to give examples of PhD's who can.
        mmt 8y ago
        That made me wonder, though, in this particular context, are these really outliers? Even just counting population, the Bay Area's CSA is 8.8M, NYC is 23.9M, Boston is 8.2M and LA is 18.9M. That's already over 18% of the population, just in the major urban centers of California and the Northeast. It's not much of a stretch for the percentage of tech jobs to be in those areas, and less of a stretch to imagine that the vast majority would be in some kind of high-cost area. I wasn't able to come up with suitable web search terms to find any numbers, but perhaps someone else has.
        antt 8y ago
        Throw in Seattle and there are no tech jobs outside those areas to a first approximation. I don't know where the people above are getting hired, but the only places I've ever seen outside those major cities are incidental programming jobs to babysit VBA code that runs some business that has nothing to do with computers.
madenine 8y ago
Outside the bay area, 95-120 is about the going rate for someone with those skills. Add a little for the bigger cities, and maybe 10k for every 3-5 years of experience.

by antt 8y ago

BeetleB 8y ago

>If you expect to pay that little to anyone who knows the above to any degree you will have a bad time. I believe you misunderstood his point. The $95-120K figure is for people who do not do ground breaking research. Anecdotally, I know people who get hired for data science who are doing very little data sciencey stuff (a bit of data manipulation/slicing and lots of plots - almost no actual ML). These people should not get paid more than a typical SW developer, and decent SW developers should get paid more.

antt 8y ago
> - SQL - AWS/Azure - Tableau/Power BI/Other BI tools - Python/R - Increasingly Hadoop/Spark Is above and beyond a typical SW developer. That's three languages and two dsls. If you expect that on a 120k salary, you will be what you pay for, e.g. a code monkey living on peanuts.
- BeetleB 8y ago
  First, I don't think he meant they expect you to know all of these - just a subset. Second, most people I know who know R or Pandas or other Python numerical stuff (NumPy/SciPy) are horrible programmers. They're good at numerical work - but that doesn't translate to good coding skills. The bar is not that high to know it. It's somewhat similar with AWS/Hadoop. Most people I know have taken learn these (online training, in person classes, etc) with very basic SW skills. I don't doubt expert programmers exist who know these technologies - I'm just pointing out that it's not that hard to learn some of these. Plenty of people learn these without knowing much SW. To be a good SW developer takes a lot more. >If you expect that on a 120k salary, you will be what you pay for, e.g. a code monkey living on peanuts. You must be in the Bay Area. A 120K salary is above the median for SW developers for most of the country, and grants them a great lifestyle: Big house, two cars, vacation travel, etc. Hardly "living on peanuts". The GP was clear he was not talking about the Bay area: >If you fit that bill you can probably get a role paying $95-120k just about anywhere in the US. Finally, the point is: If you studied actual Machine Learning, he is pointing out that these jobs are mostly not that, and you will just do a boring job.
  - antt 8y ago
    >You must be in the Bay Area. A 120K salary is above the median for SW developers for most of the country, and grants them a great lifestyle: Big house, two cars, vacation travel, etc. Hardly "living on peanuts". I'm not in the US currently. I have worked with teams in New York in finance and the wages expected were multiples of 120k. Likewise in London and Honk Kong.
    - checkyoursudo 8y ago
      So, some of the most expensive cities in the world. How about the likes of Minneapolis or Frankfurt or Jakarta?
    - BeetleB 8y ago
      Most of the US is not California or the NE. When someone says "most", they mean the outliers are not included. When one says "most Americans can't point out Egypt on the map", it's rather pointless to give examples of PhD's who can.
      - mmt 8y ago
        That made me wonder, though, in this particular context, are these really outliers? Even just counting population, the Bay Area's CSA is 8.8M, NYC is 23.9M, Boston is 8.2M and LA is 18.9M. That's already over 18% of the population, just in the major urban centers of California and the Northeast. It's not much of a stretch for the percentage of tech jobs to be in those areas, and less of a stretch to imagine that the vast majority would be in some kind of high-cost area. I wasn't able to come up with suitable web search terms to find any numbers, but perhaps someone else has.
        antt 8y ago
        Throw in Seattle and there are no tech jobs outside those areas to a first approximation. I don't know where the people above are getting hired, but the only places I've ever seen outside those major cities are incidental programming jobs to babysit VBA code that runs some business that has nothing to do with computers.

madenine 8y ago

Outside the bay area, 95-120 is about the going rate for someone with those skills. Add a little for the bigger cities, and maybe 10k for every 3-5 years of experience.