3 ms·

People come to data science from a mix of CompSci, Business, and Statistics/Research backgrounds, often with some, but not all of the skillset. From what I've

People come to data science from a mix of CompSci, Business, and Statistics/Research backgrounds, often with some, but not all of the skillset. From what I've seen, it can be hard for people from any of those camps to to look into the other two camps and discern which of the skills are expected/important/relevant to a data science role. This kind of article can be valuable as efficient diagnostics way to prioritize skills worth learning. E.g. I'm from a business background, but regularly use SQL and Python. I know I'd need those to work productively in data science. But do I also need to know Git? Best practices to avoid SQL injection? What a monad is? How to implement Djikstra's? I'm interested to learn all of those things, but I also have a personal life and an entire second list of know-I-don't-knows in statistics. It can be helpful to get confirmation that "yeah, you know enough SQL, but it's worth learning a little bit about graph traversal."

bigred100 7y ago
I’m not in data science, but my question is what CS fundamentals like that have to do with DS. I thought it would have to do with data cleansing/storage/access etc, statistics/ML, and then the stuff relevant specifically related to computing statistical or “machine learning” stuff (optimization, how do you get a gradient, basic numerical stuff). And then maybe stuff like parallelization at large scale. And then just knowing how to use your libraries of choice
- dataguy12 7y ago
  This is a great question! This again, depends on the company and even team you are interviewing. Some data scientists are asked to answer questions about linked lists because the team might need you to not only research models but also implement them. Some data scientists take on more of a data engineering role, others data analysts and research scientist. It really depends what the company wants. The beginning of the post discusses various companies and what they might expect based on both personal experience and glass door.

bigred100 7y ago

I’m not in data science, but my question is what CS fundamentals like that have to do with DS. I thought it would have to do with data cleansing/storage/access etc, statistics/ML, and then the stuff relevant specifically related to computing statistical or “machine learning” stuff (optimization, how do you get a gradient, basic numerical stuff). And then maybe stuff like parallelization at large scale. And then just knowing how to use your libraries of choice

dataguy12 7y ago
This is a great question! This again, depends on the company and even team you are interviewing. Some data scientists are asked to answer questions about linked lists because the team might need you to not only research models but also implement them. Some data scientists take on more of a data engineering role, others data analysts and research scientist. It really depends what the company wants. The beginning of the post discusses various companies and what they might expect based on both personal experience and glass door.