Thoughts on data science questions from myself (worked 2 junior data science positions after ~1 year of self-study) and my circles (mostly DS/ML at tech orgs):
How to decide whether data science or software engineering would be a better fit for someone?
Data science work involves more uncertainty and longer iteration times (i.e. debugging workflow is more of an art and takes half a day as opposed to a minute). Does this sound like a pro or con?
DS/ML hiring managers care more about pedigree. Your resume may be auto-filtered by HR/scanning software if you don’t have a graduate degree in ML/math/stats/computational science. Do you have one/would this be of interest to you?
What areas of DS/ML are you most interested in? Depending on what that is, SWE and DS work may not be mutually exclusive: Look into positions in analytics engineering, ML engineering, data engineering, software engineering for telemetry/observability (common in organizations with more mature analytics departments).
How can someone study at home and find their first job in data science?
Would you like to mentor data scientists sometimes? I’d be very open to special requests, like “only people in stage X of their career”, and you can also decide to stop any time.
I’d be willing to mentor data scientists, though would probably only be useful to people more junior (i.e. finding their first job in data science).
Thoughts on data science questions from myself (worked 2 junior data science positions after ~1 year of self-study) and my circles (mostly DS/ML at tech orgs):
Data science work involves more uncertainty and longer iteration times (i.e. debugging workflow is more of an art and takes half a day as opposed to a minute). Does this sound like a pro or con?
DS/ML hiring managers care more about pedigree. Your resume may be auto-filtered by HR/scanning software if you don’t have a graduate degree in ML/math/stats/computational science. Do you have one/would this be of interest to you?
What areas of DS/ML are you most interested in? Depending on what that is, SWE and DS work may not be mutually exclusive: Look into positions in analytics engineering, ML engineering, data engineering, software engineering for telemetry/observability (common in organizations with more mature analytics departments).
Potentially useful blog post from a friend of mine, that mirrors the path I took: https://nicholasvadivelu.com/2020/08/30/learn-data-sci/
I’d be willing to mentor data scientists, though would probably only be useful to people more junior (i.e. finding their first job in data science).