223 karma · joined October 28, 2015
Minutes before totality started, a black bear walked casually within 10 feet of me. I remember thinking that my viewing experience was going to be ruined because some bear was going to attack me. It ended up just looking at me and strolling casually along. Very strange indeed.
Apply for and interviewing for data science jobs is a total nightmare. You are competing against 100s or even 1000s of applicants for every job posting because someone said it was one of the sexiest careers of the 21st century. Further exacerbating this, Everyone believes that data is the new oil, and large profit multipliers are just waiting to be discovered in this virgin data that companies are sitting on. All that is missing is someone to run some neural network, or deep learning algo on it to discover the insights that nobody else can see.
The reality is that there is an army of people who know how to run these algos. MOOC's, blogs, youtube, etc have been teaching everyone how to use these python/R packages for years. The lucky few who get that coveted data science job can't wait to apply these libraries to the virgin data only to find that they have to do all kinda of data manipulating to make the algos even work, which takes days and weeks of mundane work. Finally they find out the data is so lacking that their deep learning model does very little in providing actual business value. It is overly complicated, computationally expensive, and in the back of your mind know you can get the same results using some simple logic.
Managers who don't understand data science fundamentals learn from the news and have their data scientist implement those buzz words so they can look good in front of their bosses.
I think there is a place for data scientists who understand the fundamentals of the models out there, and know when you should not use them. Data science is also increasingly a subset of software engineering and a good data science in a tech company should be able to code well. I also think that there is not some huge unmet demand for data scientists. Just a huge amount of hype and managers wanting to look good by saying they managed a data science team.
But this is exactly why TSLA is worth so much right now as so many people think the same way as you. They all want to bet big on Tesla and Elon. It is the most interesting stock to watch as it hemorrhages money and just keeps going up and up.
All this hype makes it so everyone wants to be a data scientist. You get people who change careers to go into this new hot career. You also have a pool of people who have been working with data well before the hype with experience. The people trying to break into data science will have a very hard time competing with the people with experience over the pool of jobs out there.
The problem is that there are hundreds of applicants in your situation WITHOUT experience. There are usually a couple of PHD or MS applications WITH experience for every job. Who do you think the company would give preference to?
The field is absolutely saturated with people who want to be a data scientist but have no experience. This is where some of that gate keeping comes from.
The people who have it easy are the ones with a MS or PHD and years of experience doing data science work at companies under their belt. There are very few of these people right now.
There is this idea that data science is needed everywhere and there is a HUGE supply of jobs. As an example if you search for data scientist jobs at glassdoor.com in San Francisco there are ~2000 jobs. If you search for software engineer in San Francisco there are ~9000. Similar ratios can be found in any major tech city. Data science does not scale like software engineering in companies but the narrative out there is that this is the job to be in and there is this huge unmet need. It is all hype.
Either there are a lot of companies which employ unskilled developers who cannot even code fizzbuzz, or interviewing is not a great way to understand specific types of people.
The only thing that matters between these two different approaches to learning is if you can create value with the knowledge you gained. That is the only thing people will pay for, value.
There is no clear path to demonstrate the value you can create from the knowledge you gained and this is where I think a lot of people get lost.
An example of this: A malicious tenant can just stop paying rent, the landlord will then start the eviction process. But the tenant already anticipated this and filled for bankruptcy without the landlord knowing. That then makes it so you can no longer evict the tenant and they receive protections. This buys them even more time to live for free and the landlord is powerless.
I think it is important to have tenant protections and landlord protections. I am sure there are many tenants who have a legitimate reason they cannot pay rent and should be given leniency with the expectation that they are trying to get back to normal. But when landlords come across tenants who purposely work the system in order to obtain free rent there should be a course of action the landlord can take to ensure these people cannot continue doing so. Based on my experience, and in my area, there are no real penalties for rental fraudsters, like are described in this article. This guy has been running the same scam for years against multiple people, why can this not be stopped?
I understand this can vary significantly based on location, but this is what I have noticed in my city.
Not to say that a data science boot camp is all you would ever need to know, but I would give them a little more credit in what they teach. That galvanize link is not really their syllabus, they probably keep it vague to force you to sign up to their email list to get the real one.
This is what I see happening with real estate right now. I feel like the majority of people who are driving up the prices are the people who were lucky to buy property at the right time and right place in the past and are cashing in now and trading up to a much nicer property in a different less expensive city or even in the same city they live in.
It can make sense to stay in the same city and trade up, the economy is better now, they most likely have higher paying jobs and their profits from their old property effectively reduces the cost of new properties to house prices many years ago assuming they use their profit as a down payment.
It is the people who were not homeowners before who are suffering in this market. This is why house values have no attachment to wages. Wages are not what are determining prices. It is the profits from previously purchased property which is fueling this market.
Blue Apron also does a good job at allowing you to send back the materials so they can recycle them. I just point this out as I think they get a lot of criticism for a company that I don't think generates more trash than a lot of alternatives and they give an option to recycle.
The idea that homes are just another path to making money needs to end, they are supposed to be a home for people to live in. This is what I believe is driving up prices so much these days.