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Comment by junkscience2017 | Hacker News Reader

junkscience2017

probably some realization that 99% of their actual job is ORDER BY, GROUP BY, SUM...not a bunch of cool math scrawled on a whiteboard

I tried warning people off of this field given that they would be doing sql query monkey work and drawing simple line charts...most definitely not an upgrade from software development like it was sold as

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They’re probably in the wrong company. Are you suggesting there are isn’t an explosion of jobs and applications requiring advance math and machine learning or statistical inference? If so you are off the mark.

You're right of course, but still there is a point: For 1 'intellectually' interesting data science job created there's probably 10 that have more to do with data massaging and all the relatively boring logistical stuff that come with data science.

Doesn't invalidate your point, but the majority of jobs under the very broad 'data science' label just aren't super interesting after all. Guess you just have to be careful to examine exactly what a specific 'data science' position entails.

I've found this to be very true. I've got friends who were hired as data scientists, paid a great salary, and are finding themselves doing basic reporting and SQL querying all day. No statistical modeling, and certainly no building anything.

Depends how you look at it.

Any decent Comp. Sci. University will have enough math and statistics.

I am absolutely saying that the expected case for data science is writing basic sql

Totally depends on what problem your trying to solve, what tools your employer have setup, and what data science you know how to do. The field is still not very mature, but as the tools get easier to use and companies understand how they can solve problems using machine learning and data science, and data pipelines are thought of at the beginning of projects, it will be a lot easier to apply more sophisticated techniques.

as the tools become more sophisticated, the more rote the work will be

if a cloud vendor deploys a tool that derives some canned results very quickly at the push of a button, business leaders will prefer those to magic deep queries that take a weekend to run

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