Preparing for data science roles
I found the following material very useful in my own journey. I thought I should share with the community to help others. 1. Basic combinatorics, probability, stats - Don’t Memorise channel on YouTube - jbstatistics channel on YouTube 2. Statistical/Machine Learning - lectures by Trevor Hastie and Rob Tibshirani (Google ISLR videos, usually the first link - dataschool.io - will take you there) These are fantastic lectures based on the fantastic book Introduction to Statistical Learning by the same authors, they will introduce R as well. 3. Python - David Beazley Python Tutorial on YouTube (Really anything by Dave is superb!) - Corey Schafer Python on YouTube (This guy’s phenomenal) 4. SQL - just google it - not that hard - get a good grasp on joins, unions, aggregate functions, group by, order by, sub queries (including correlated queries) Obviously, learning is most affective when one actually practices, and not merely by watching videos. That’s why people recommend kaggle and such. With that said, it’s really important to understand the theory and concepts as well. And for this, the above is invaluable! Going through the above should help you tackle most data science interview questions with relative ease, and better prepare you for the job. And yes TC ~ 220-230k...Blind’s tradition Add on: I just wanted to clarify one thing. The above is more of a guideline for people interested in typical data science roles (extract and clean data sets, perform data mining, perform statistical analyses, make business recommendations...you get the picture) and not so much pure ML roles, for which one would need a PhD in CS, AI, applied mathematics, and so on.
What about product analytics questions and ML system design? Did you study those?
Product analytics questions are company specific and depends on the individual’s experience. I didn’t study those in any detail. ML system design intersects SW and data engineering roles, which is outside of my focus and scope.
Gotcha. How much leetcode did you have to do to get into a data science role with a good company?
That’s good info. You changed company or roles?
Nope. Still same company, but most of what I’ve been doing is data analytics. I went through months of studying, to keep my skills fresh and be ready for interviews. In the process I learned a lot and found really excellent resources for really any perspective and/or practicing data scientist, which I summarized above.