Data Engineer vs Data Scientist at T-Mobile (or wherever you work)
I am not currently in a tech role but am seriously thinking of doing a combination of self-studying and a bootcamp. I am interested in either becoming a data engineer or data scientist. I know that data engineers work on creating pipelines, while data scientists are more business orientated and interpret data. I think since I am more of a people's person I would enjoy being a data scientist more that a data engineer but I was hoping to get a consensus on a couple of things. 1. Do most data engineers and data scientists start out as data analysts? 2. Are a lot of the skill sets data engineers and data scientists have similar? What would these skill sets be? 3. I would imagine that at a small company or startup data engineers/data scientists might have to do all data related work, where as in bigger companies, like T-mobile people are doing very segmented work. Where would be the best place to gain the most learning experience? 4. Do you think the role of data engineers/ data scientists are different depending on the company's industry? Or do you think that work is similar across industries. Thanks for all your help. TC: 80K
1. Yes, traditionally... but with the sudden surge in popularity of the title, you have people coming from all over the place. 2. Yes, both will share programming skills, but data scientists know more math or stats, and the engineer will know more computer science. Learn the spark framework, it'll be used by both. Don't just learn pyspark programming, learn what spark does and how it works. 3. It's a double edged sword. Smaller companies have more room for diverse problems, but less resources. A large company might be able to expose you to petabytes of highly dimensional data and allow you to switch teams every so often. 4. Totally different, even within companies. Nobody agrees on what these jobs really should do, and companies are chasing the trend by using these titles to attract people into whatever opening they can't fill. Ignore the title and ask the recruiter how much of each of these tasks the position will do: -Moving and Transforming Data -Automation -Building Predictive Models -Building Dashboards -Presentations -Application Development -Research Match these answers to your preferences, and ignore the title.