Re:Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data scie...
by samuraixp on Friday May 05, 2017 @09:49AM
(#14273388)
Awesome, so what qualifications do your Data Science team members have and would you hire someone without a degree? Or what if they had a data science / ML / AI MOOC like Udacity or Coursera? And do you have any advice for OP or others who don't have degrees?
Re:Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data scie...
by nl on Friday May 05, 2017 @11:34PM
(#14278522)
We've interviewed people without degrees for SWE positions. I don't think we've hired any.
I wouldn't rule it out, but it would be useful to have accomplishments to point to, or a personal recommendation.
We have a stack of maybe 25 well qualified PhD data scientists waiting for interviews. It takes a lot to get to the head of that line.
We have statisticians (yes, plural) on my team who have published in Nature, and plenty with other backgrounds.
Even ignoring the data engineering side, there is plenty that statisticians don't do or know which is useful data science.
Take the two attitudes to p-tests, or what a "reasonable number of features" means. You drop the Jeff Dean "consider training models with billions of features" quote on a statistcians desk and see their eyes open.
Statistics is great, but data science is just as much programming as it is stats.