Someone I know is a data science manager at FB and when I asked, they said they don't do any machine learning or statistics. This person got defensive and started arguing that data science does not mean only machine learning and can be Excel too! I was ok - this is crazy Is this is a glorified SQL / Excel job with just a fancy title?
Who knows, maybe there's some DS out there who doesn't code. I guess technically this guy is right. But most DS would know R or Python here. How the f else would you do your job easily. Trying to do it in excel sounds like a very painful way of being a DS at fb.
I've seen a very wide spectrum at FB, from the glorified product analysts (SQL, occasional python notebooks) to deeply technical folks who do some pretty advanced ML/statistical work. I'd say generally my perception of the 'Data Scientist' title has taken quite the hit since joining FB.
I would say the split is 80:20 though. I mean there is a spectrum, but I feel like most are just product analysts. Have you seen the interviews for the roles? They’re just SQL (basic too, aggregation and two table joins) and high school stats (conditional probability and hypothesis testing). I’m often surprised to see PhDs from quantitative disciplines as ‘data scientist, analytics’, but I guess that’s what you get when you pay product analysts better than SWE’s from most companies 🤡
Those interview loops are quite hard to pass as far as I know. I have a number of friends went through them because the comp is high - and they're all solid people - that didn't make the loop. They're SWE at other companies and definitely coding is not an issue. The challenge I think has to do with the same person passing 3 loops - PM, Coding and Stats/Quant.
You need to remember, DS is just an umbrella term. DS includes ML, but it's not whole and sole. Also the company doesn't care what you want to call yourselves, as long as your work improves their product/service even by a tiny bit.
A data scientist is a data analyst living in California
Also it depends which team u join most probably from the look of it looks like the analytics org , may not have major engg challenges and ML pipelines how they run in production kind of stuff ? May have ds and stats on making products better , some analysis and running hive queries ( optimizing them )
Any DS at Facebook who only uses excel is either: a) bad ; b) has been here for a very long time and is coasting on historical knowledge ; c) a manager who uses excel to answer basic questions like averages or standard deviations. Most DS’s use R or python and stats to solve problems. ML is indeed in short supply because it is often too heavy handed a tool to solve FB’s problems and black box models are not well received by leadership.
what level is a DS manager at fb?
Could be 5,6,7
Is a DS manager 5 similar to a Data Scientist IC5 in terms of salary? And DS manager level 6 similar to Data Scientist IC6? Thanks in advance!
Is a DS manager 5 similar to a Data Scientist IC5 in terms of salary? And DS manager level 6 similar to Data Scientist IC6?
Excel work is DS? Who was this ignorant fool?
No. Even the non-tech DS teams I know at FB heavily use R and Python and even some Spark