Comment by icedistilled | Hacker News Reader

Comment by icedistilled | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the author making the effort to write up an article to help people find their career paths, it's more than I've done, but their article needs some revisions since some things are wrong.

The welcome splash graphic shows data science having one of the lowest people skill requirements? What?

Yeah I get it's still a hazily defined field, but literally every attempted definition I've seen includes greater business/domain knowledge than the average programmer, which usually implies working and communicating with different business stakeholders. And DS requires a lot of communication for getting buy in for the new models.

They also should be fairly independent since they have to do a lot of exploring of the data and coming up with ways to get useful, actionable insight out of it, often creating a predictive model.

It's going to be hard to take the rest of the article seriously with things like that in the splash graphic.

Yeah it seemed kind of strange to me that Data Science and R&D are both not considered highly independent, I guess on some teams there is a more collaborative atmosphere but most of the data science work I have done seemed pretty independent. The people skills I agree with also, can't see how any data scientist could get by without strong people skills to communicate their results with leaders and to collaborate with subject matter experts.

That's a fair critique, although I didn't mean to imply that any of these roles take 0 people skills - only that some involve more time creating things solo vs. interacting with a team.

I also think there's a lot of variation in these roles, so my experience with them is probably just limited.

Similarly Teacher and Trainer should have the most people skills requirement and be all the way to the right.

Security Analyst and Business Analyst have a high people skills requirement as well, you spend your time hovering and translating 2 domains:

- Security or Business

- Developers

And often sales, marketing, legal as well.

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