I am a DS and I mostly write SQL queries with a little bit of data wrangling and visualization now and then. I know the type of work varies across data science but I get the feeling that many, if not most data scientists in faang are not satisfied with their role. Reasons include low TC, prestige compared to SWE. Other data scientists at Faang, what do you think? You feel the same? I am not including core data science at FB, those folks do hardcore stuff.
Most companies just need more people to do product analytics work (SQL, aggregating data, understanding basic stats) than those doing hardcore machine learning. They market the jobs as ādata scientistā to get better people. Then these people are all disappointed when all they do is SQL. Itās a viscous cycle. But the reality is from a business perspective machine learning problems are actually few and far between compared to analytics problems. Also how is the interview and TC for Apple DS
Even better when the interview loop for senior roles as DS contain leetcode and DS&A when the job is literally using SQL to build data sets and then modeling / deploying. Kind of a joke these days
@john_list is soo true ! Iām the victim šŖ donāt trust the job titles and the crap they say in interviews.
It's like being an engineer at a bank. You're not the "front office", you're just support, so no matter how important your work is, it's not going to be rewarded. I used to be DS, then I got sick of low pay and switched to engineering. Managers with decades of experience got less than a SWE with only a few yoe at my company. Ironically I'm currently at a bank, but still more money than DS XD Tbh I actually like a lot of things about an analytics job. If the infra is set up well, and product/ops/business management aren't idiots it's pretty fun to go through data and think of small optimizations and such. Doing some of the data engineering can be fun too. If you're just an English to SQL translator for some idiot then it sucks.
How did you switch from DS to engineering? How did you market your profile and get recruiters' attention?
Not FAANG and it's flexible with titles here, but I have to take the rare chance to make positive post š I would think you'd be right. What you're describing is definitely the industry trend I read about. But that's not what I see here at O, of all the suprising places. If anything, it's a sort of title deflation. Sure, many analysts are what you describe as your job, no question there. But another large portion of them seem to do much more, many without the DS title. Can't do data work without at least some ETL, but many are also actively using skills in experimental design, ML engineering, statistics, stakeholder management, and building scalable data visualization. Most couldn't tell you about some things ML PhD grads take for granted, but never the less, I'd say it's still miles ahead of what a traditional analyst would do. If you don't view academic research as a critical thing for the title, I'd call all of these people real DSs (and some do have the title) Given that Oracle is still a very large company, I hope this says something better about the trend. May not be as inflated a title and mundane of work as you may think from some companies Don't know about TC though. Assume it's still way less than ML engineers working and PMs "working" on products. Product dev will always be most valued in tech
What about reseach engineer at Apple? Is it the same thing?
TC?