'Data Science' Is Dead 139
Nerval's Lobster writes "If you're going to make up a cool-sounding job title for yourself, 'Data Scientist' seems to fit the bill. When you put 'Data Scientist' on your resume, recruiters perk up, don't they? Go to the Strata conference and look on the jobs board — every company wants to hire Data Scientists. Time to jump aboard that bandwagon, right? Wrong, argues Miko Matsumura in a new column. 'Not only is Data Science not a science, it's not even a good job prospect,' he writes. 'Companies continue to burn millions of dollars to collect and gamely pick through the data under respective roofs. What's the time-to-value of the average "Big Data" project? How about "Never?"' After the 'Big Data' buzz cools a bit, he argues, it will be clear to everyone that 'Data Science' is dead and the job function of 'Data Scientist' will have jumped the shark."
data scientist (Score:5, Informative)
Call yourself a statistician or database engineer and I promise there are still jobs around. And contrary to the summary, they are highly valuable jobs.
Re:FUD (Score:5, Informative)
Science creates knowledge via controlled experiments
Which is false. Science checks hypotheses and tries to prove them, or makes repeated experiments that show the failure to disprove them.
Re:Whooaaaa!!! Hold on there, big boy! (Score:5, Informative)
You should have a different resume for each job you apply for......
Keep a master resume with all of your details. When you apply for a job, copy the master and pare it down to the information most relevant to the job you are applying for. Then edit the result so that you look like the perfect candidate.....update project descriptions to emphasize the same buzzwords in the job listing, etc.
If you only have one resume that you blast out to a ton of different job listings and they'll probably focus on the projects that are meaningless to their situation and weed you out more often than not.
Oh, and BI (business intelligence) is still going strong at the company I work for......(not my area, but there's still tons of work under that label).