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> I argue from data that the Data Scientist role is poorly differentiated and I speculate that its responsibilities are being eroded by better specified roles s
by gsuuon 3y ago
> I argue from data that the Data Scientist role is poorly differentiated and I speculate that its responsibilities are being eroded by better specified roles such as ML Engineer and Data Scientist.
I'm already struggling to parse the first paragraph -- is this a typo? Or do they mean a role that is both ML Engineer and Data Scientist?
- elAhmo 3y agoThere seems to be a typo there. But in general, I understood the argument as different roles that have narrower and better scopes are causing less popularity of the data scientist role. Basically, DS was/is used as an umbrella term to cover many different things, and as companies are understanding the field better, they are moving towards more specific roles they need (such as ML engineer), rather than hiring for a data scientist role.
- nerdponx 3y agoNot a typo, this is is actually an industry trend. Companies think they need a "data scientist" but they actually want a "software engineer with enough stats/data background to implement data science algorithms in production." The result is that a lot of "data scientist" jobs are mostly data engineering or ML engineering and that is reflected in the list of requirements. It makes finding a good job extremely difficult, and it's for the better that the "data scientist" title is being eroded, because it makes it easier to tell when a "data scientist" job is actually data science as opposed to something else. Not that "data science" is a good name anyway, but that's another story.
- digging 3y agoPresumably one of those Data Scientist instances is meant to be Data Engineer?
- usgroup 3y agoYeah that’s right : typo
- tomrod 3y agoYeah, seems like the second "Data Scientist" mention should actually be Data Engineer. Missing is the Data Analyst component, and (as is normally typical in the discussion) the statistical experimenter (A/B, MAB, etc.)
- usgroup 3y agosee discussion section.
- its_a_random_ac 3y agoSomething I've run into is that a while ago, there were "Type A" ("Analysts") and "Type B" ("Builders") data scientists [1] , but most job postings now are just looking for "Type A" data scientists, and the "Type B" openings have been renamed to "ML Engineer" or "Data Engineer." Took me for a bit of a spin because when I was first interviewing this year, I'd apply for DS roles and only get interviews that were very stats heavy with a leetcode easy, but started getting further when I basically stopped applying for DS roles and went straight for MLE roles. [1] https://medium.com/@rchang/my-two-year-journey-as-a-data-scientist-at-twitter-f0c13298aee6 https://medium.com/@rchang/my-two-year-journey-as-a-data-sci...