It’s obvious that data scientist roles are less technical than SWE roles, but they work more closely with business stake holders. In this case, do they have more visibilily to senior management and have a better chance for promotion? Is it easier to make it to director or vp for data scientists? Also let’s compare data scientists vs consultants at consulting firms, do they have similar career path? From my understanding, data scientists are like internal consultants to product teams. Consultants from MBB always have great chances to make it to the management later in their life, how a bout data scientists?
Internal consultants to product teams? You think that’s all they do?
Data scientists at FLAG are certainly like this. You can say they are more like product analytics but they are called data scientists.
I guess fake titles. Unless they have PhDs (maybe masters) and develop new algorithms, I wouldn’t call them data scientists. Seems like Companies give those titles to anyone these days.
Today’s world anyone who makes some charts and add colors call them Data Scientist. Majority of these so called scientists are same as data warehouse, business intelligence, roles. True Data Scientist are Combo of computer science, statisticians, mathematician and quantitative with business acumen
PMs manage lots of engineers. They need to reach VP level (at Amazon not Goldman Sachs) though before that coveted opportunity. I’d guess similar requirement for Data Scientists.
By real data scientist, I think the definition should be someone with strong technical skills, and also business acumen. They can do analytics, experiments and build machine learning into production. But to be honest, data scientists at top tech firms focus a lot on analytics part nowadays, and do only some ab testing and modeling depending on team. So in this post, I intended to ask the career path for these data scientists in such tech firms.
I think it’s time for the market to make a clear distinction on these roles. If someone is building models from scratch and that’s going into production, they’re scientists. If they’re importing packages to run models/design small experiments that help them communicate insights to business, they’re analysts. If they’re putting models into production, they’re MLEs.
"Less technical" You're on drugs right now, right? Any legit data scientist will have made it through at least baby Rudin...
I know people at FAANG who have no exposure to real analysis btw. Just some statistics
Data scientists by title are vague. I mean data scientists at these top tech firms, they are DS analytics.