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Basically, I want to see if people can finish stuff. For software engineers, tasks tend to be easily defined and of shorter duration. At least at Bright, we have Data Scientists working on multiple simultaneous projects that take a few days to several weeks to complete. Knowing when you are done with a complicated, possibly open-ended, project is very difficult.

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For software engineers, tasks tend to be easily defined and of shorter duration.

For crappy ones doing commodity work, this is true. For good software engineers, not so much.

I'm a data scientist by pedigree (before it was called that) who's spent the past few years in "regular old" software engineering (and probably heading back in the DS direction). Trust me that software engineering done right is as subtle and talent-intensive as DS.

The problem is that SWE's are terrible at marketing themselves as a group and generally get too little respect and autonomy to have architectural successes.

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