Data science boot camps worth it?
Almost everyone I know who did one ended up at a staffing firm for contract jobs, or an early stage startup. This is after 4-6 months of job searching. There are people like this person https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-land-a-data-scientist-job-at-your-dream-company-my-journey-to-airbnb-f6a1e99892e8 who got into AirBnb after 457 applications (!) but that seems to be a far and away exception. What do DS hiring managers think when they see boot camp on a resume and a section for "projects"?
Towards Data Science
What value do these have for CS grads who want to get more into data science?
DS boot camp is ok when backed by relevant formal education and experience, for example, a phd in a scientific field.
Weird. The best data science guy I know was just a psych major who started in HR recruiting and got really good at databases.
How did he get there?
It is better to take jobs where you have the opportunity to do data science projects and slowly work towards it than to do boot camps
I think “data scientist” has a broad definition. The work the article’s author was doing as a sql data analyst might be the same thing she is doing at Airbnb. The bootcamp learnings may be just a nice-to-have and it very unlikely she is working on core data science work from just the bootcamp.
This is a good point. I know some boot camp guys at Facebook with "data scientist" titles. They're just doing ad analytics, no ML model training at all.