I've been in data science / analytics for 10 years. I've done 4 different FANGS. None of the teams I've worked in have had any real impact, all the data scientist in these teams always hate their jobs because their asked to do bullshit dashboards and reports and analysis instead of having interesting scope. I don't understand at all the hype behind this career choice. The only people that seem to enjoy it are the ones that pivot into research type roles. And even then a large percentage disklike it because the teams aren't really set up for research. I hugely regret going into this field and so do 95% of the people that I meet once you get to know them and are able to have honest conversations. For anyone who's transitioned to something they enjoy, please share. TC: 450K
You are wrong and heavily biased. I worked for a successful startup for a few years, and the impact our team made in taking vital business decisions is huge. I enjoyed it a lot despite putting in 50+ hour work weeks. The problem with bigger orgs is that the impact a person/team can make decreases as the size of the org increases. This is relevant to any field and not just DS/Analytics You can wipe your tears with all that TC tho.
The $$$ helps me sleep at night that's for sure. Agreed, my experience has only been in FANG so there's definitely bias here. Great to hear that it's working out well for you.
You’d imagine running experiments at an early stage company on major feature changes could be very impactful, vs at a large company when you are sometimes running experiments on the dumbest, smallest changes trying to move the needle by a fraction for an even smaller fraction of the user base
Making 450k with zero impact as openly stated in the post is the real issue here. The comps are so artificially inflated across the board.
I mean there is impact, it's just not real. Does shaping a weekly business review that no one pays attention to count as impact? What about helping teams plan their next year roadmaps that are never used for anything except showing leadership? Dashboards that are minimally used? There is some impact. If it was my company though, I'd fire the entire department. Keep 1 junior person that loves SQL, attach them to business teams and call it a day.
Exactly what I mean. All positions have become just glorified titles to justify the absurd compensation. Next iteration of chatGPT or a more niche solution can do what most average data scientists are doing now. Overall I believe we are in for a rude awakening in a few years as the supply catches up with the demand.
Do you get input in designing experiments? I’ve designed a bunch of experiments in my role, and the outcome of the experiments has guided business decisions. I’ve found that to be satisfying.
Thank you for sharing 🙏
Meh.. I've designed and run experiments dozens of customer facing products for large companies. When the POs don't get the result they want, they just say you did it wrong and launch their feature anyway. And when they do get the result they want they pat themselves on the back. Spent years building an experimentation platform that turned out to be a huge waste of time and money.
I never really knew that much about DS but from the outside, it always seemed boring. Either setting up dashboards and automated reports or maybe doing some one-off work to answer a PM's questions. Is there better DS work you wish you could be doing but aren't? What kind of research do DS folks do?
Building dashboards and stuff is not even DS. The amount of crap non DS people tell about DS is funny.
I've worked at smaller companies where they were involved in that kind of thing. But my post if also seeking info. Enlighten me!
It's an easy career with great pay. I'm here for the ride. We don't have to grind months of LC to get a fat paycheck. On that note, how is DS at Bytedance??? That TC is attractive.
I am now 5 years into my Data Science career under various titles and I really enjoy the actual data science work. What sucks is the fact that I’ve worked on way too many PoCs out of which many did not make any impact. They did however hone my skills and it was fun developing them. The more senior I get, the more careful I am about working on projects. If no pathway to production, I am very cautious to work on those projects. Usually the production use cases are high in impact.
Hi, can I Dm you for a referral to Microsoft?
My experience with DS is a mixed bag. I’ve seen projects where teams hallucinating over meaningless data while some really make an impact.
Just hire a SWE or DE that’s taken a couple stats classes for the hard stuff and then fill the rest of the positions with cheap analysts.
Absolutely True. But rather than saying Data Science sucks, I would say these big companies sucks in Data Science. I was working in a FAANG + M company, and there was not Machine learning work for a Data Scientist. It's boring and slow. and mostly SWE or data cleaning tasks. Then I moved to a startup and really started enjoying the real Machine Learning applied to real life problems.
Can I dm you? I'm sort of in a similar position and I'm thinking of what I should do.
I am in the same boat….
Just came to say, I agree
+1 creating dashboards for these business stakeholders drain the life out of me, they really care about the color of these charts and the font size etc.