Ask HN: Do startups actually do data science?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8720216

by shazam • 12 years ago

2 2 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm a Stanford MS candidate in CS. Are there any startups actually hiring for real data science positions? The term seems so overloaded to the extent that recruiters are ready to label anything from Excel to "data infrastructure" as data science. Where can I find a role working on actual ML problems?

mindcrime• 12 years ago

Well, you can do "data science" in Excel, depending on what you take "data science" to mean. And infrastructure is part of doing data science. I don't think "data science" really means much of anything in practice.

You'll need to carefully define what kind of work you're interested in doing: text mining with NLP, predictive analytics, data mining, ML research, symbolic AI (yeah, that's still around as well), optimization type problems using genetic algorithms, etc. And then probe the company's job posts and dig in with the recruiters, and screen out the bogus stuff.

If somebody advertises for a "data scientist" just treat that as a weak signal that they might be a match, and work from there.

One thought to consider: Instead of working as a FTE in internal IT for some company, you might consider becoming a consultant. You could look at working for a company like Hortonworks or Cloudera, who both have services arms, where you could travel from company to company, working on different kinds of problems.

shazam• 12 years ago

You're right the term can mean anything, but I alluded to my meaning when I mentioned "ML problems".

Thanks for the tip about Hortonworks/Cloudera, I had never considered such a role but that's exactly what I want to be doing next year.

Ask HN: Do startups actually do data science?

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