Data Analysis/Science/Business Intelligence

Anyone here doing Business Intelligence or Data Science/Analysis as a career? I'm currently a programmer (bachelor's in CS) but i think it would be more interesting to work with data. Also, easier, since you don't have to keep up with the latest javascript technologies.
Any thoughts on salary and career prospects and what it would take to get into one of these areas? I live in CA though not in the Bay Area..

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Yeah, but then again I have a masters and a Ph.D. If you want to get into data science without wasting so many years on grad school I would recommend you become REALLY good at python and SQL and buy a few good books on statistics and probability. This should be more than enough for getting a job as a data scientist. Also D3.js could help so don't say bye to JS just yet. Salary-wise... it's not that great if you only have an undergrad, I would suggest just becoming a software engineer, they pay way better if you only have a bs

What is your masters degree on?

>i think it would be more interesting to work with data.
if you're programming that's what you're doing you dumb shit

B.S. in EE, M.S. in BME (which turned out to be bs for the most part), PhD in Neuroscience (which was fun thanks to Computational Neuroscience and Robotics)

Data Science/Analysis is making sense of data, not just manipulating it.

I'm already a software engineer. I just think that business intelligence/data science might be an easier career in the long term. I'm good with SQL, ok with Python and passable with js. What kind of a salary difference it? 70k for a bachelors and > 130 with a graduate degree?

Sounds pretty good, does neuroscience really help with creating AI?

Whoah there, you're gonna need to become proficient in calculus based statistics first, along with excel and R before you can ever think of becoming a data scientist. It's fundamentally different from computer science.

Yes, I understand that I would need to study up statistics for sure. Also, can someone comment on data analysis and business intelligence? Also, some numbers regarding salaries?

$800k total comp

word. way different, desu. i'm also data scientist. also have phd. but it's a lot more about getting to causality , or that's the goal supposedly -- and causality is way diffferent than math / cs skills.

You mean 80k? And for which career track would that be?

salaries are all over the board, depending on where / who you are working for. for instance a friend of mine is making like 60K with same exact skills as me but he's totally cool with it because he's getting paid in stock options and cryptocurrency things and thinks that will pay out hugely later (so he got in at more start-uppy type , pre-investment type scene, less money initially but bigger reward if he's right) -- on the other side, you could target hedge funds and money managers and help write investor newsletters and etc -- more money there for sure, as long as you're good at it.

lmao 80k. Are you a code monkey or something?

Some nice trolling. You're getting paid 800k? Are you chief data scientist at Facebook or Google?

And how much are you getting paid? What type of company and which part of the country are you in?

250K+ for financial / bank / investment management type thing. way more than that if you focus on options and risk management for big portfolios where you can sometimes get paid based on returns. But if you're just crunching numbers and doing stats ... I don't know honestly its hard to say it varies so much -- "data science" isn't really just a single one type of job it really depends a LOT on where and what sector and what type of company. skills are the same mostly though, data is different. If you mean like what would amazon or google or them pay ... i personally wouldn't accept anything less than like $125k or so but i have no idea what they would actually offer. but i know i could say no to them and do better some place else anyhow. data science is a for real good field because everyone needs it. you'll need more than CS though , it's also about how people behave -- and causality has a lot to do with philosophy, actually.

Well since you mentioned the financial industry, I guess multiple 100k is possible. 800k total comp almost sounds like fiction but with wall street, anything's possible.

haha right now i'm getting paid like nothing hahaha. But i'm also working as a post doc still tryijng to make in academic world. i think in the next couple of years though I'll head somewhere or rather. Last summer though just for a few months I took a job with a company that needed some help analyzing their data . They paid hourly and just to get the job done. I was able to make 40k just over the summer just for them and just working hourly. That was just payment for a one-off type project they had.
But yeah postdocs are shit. also academic world is shit too god I wish i could almost go back and tell myself not to do a post doc, but whatever here i still am.

Well, when you go into the private sector, you can make bank, so the ramen life won't be eternal.

that's what they tell me, anyway. haha and that's what i told some anons in this thread, too. hahaha.
i hope that's true, desu! are you talking from after the post-doc life? (does it exist?)

Nope, I'm OP and I only have a bachelor's in computer science. I got tired of schooling. Now I would really love to go back to school and maybe get a graduate degree. But I'm 30 so maybe it's a bit late.

About to finish a B.S. in stats and go into a M.A. in business analytics, what can I expect? I got a decent gpa(3.8) and am going to a fairly prestigious post-grad, but I haven't met anyone else doing this.

i'm 31, about to be 32. i started grad school at 26. you could do it faster depending on what field and what school. go phd route because they are funded, and you could also try targeting phd programs that don't often get computer science undergrads applying to them -- because at PhD level really no matter what field really if it's dealing with data they still need computer science skills, and then all the grad students have to go and learn that somehow during grad school. that was my experience, somewhat. i didn't have computer science / maths background at all beginning school -- got that in grad school, but I can verify first hand that the department i was in was getting to the point where they were becoming pretty annoyed at how long and how many of their grad students were spending department dollars to go learn computer science for a year so beause they needed it to do a dissertation deemed valuble enough for academic market. so then they started actively targeting math and cs undergrads for applications . that's still true as far as i know. so you might consider programs like economics, sociology, communications departments, anthropology even potentially, history, things like that -- because at phd level right now they still need cs skills desparately and the ones that don't have it don't enter academia

That sounds like a good skill set if you also know sql, Python, r and excel.

haha well, i think you should expect you yourself with a bachelors in statistics to know about statistics than your business school teachers. That would be my first comment, and imo you'll do well to remember it because i know people that are currently teaching at business school that absolutely do not understand anything more complicated than a basic linear regression model.
but other than that I'd say it will vary hugely depending on who is teaching you. For instance at like a business school (which I would think would be somewhat similar to what you're doing) you'd get like 1/3 classes from business leaders on how executives make decisions and how to deal with HR and management (taught by non academics who definitely definitely do not understand statistics at all) and 1/3 sociology / psychology professors on organizaion theory and behavioral psychology and 1/3 on economics (but you'll learn in the 2/3 of the other courses why the economics models don't work so well and you'll probably also hear first hand from mr. retired ceo that he didn't look at the charts ever anyway because economics people were wrong). anyway i guess my advice would be to just stay strong senpai and remember your maths and stats. you can keep going super deep into both subjects on your own and imo that's where it's at (plus philosophy and theory -- but that maybe is better learned with experience and on the job anyway perhaps). Anyway one thing you might try to take out of it is why statistics people aren't all making bank on the stock market. that in a nutshell is the fundamental problem data science people that are getting paid are trying to solve for mr. boss man. and it turns out no one has the answer. my 2 cents. hopefully it'll be fun at least though, i loved grad school.

Well 6 years is a REALLY long time! Maybe some of it was a very ambitious thesis? As for me, the CS part wouldn't be a big deal.

Also, has anyone here looked into the 'open source' curriculum provided by MIT & Standford & other top institutions? You can get some sort of certificate. I'll explore that option soon.

Yeah, I told myself that I was looking for a more wild ride than the average student when I got into this, sounds like a blast.

i'm at a post doc. so phd part is done (hence the "post" part of postdoc) This is month... 14 of this postdoc. but you can keep going and going with postdocs places until places stop wanting to fund your research or you stop wanting to spend massive amounts of time applying for funding to get a barely survivable salary. but yeah senpai, long time. phd is no joke i'll tell you that, i did not realize what i was getting in for when i started it. so it was more like 4.5 years to finish it for me, and really i should say like 4.75. that was quick though for the program i was in, average was like 6-7. :/ . sad but true.