"How do I become a data scientist?"
I got an email recently asking something along these lines:
I’m a smart ex-engineer who likes stats. I want to be a data scientist. How difficult will it be for me to find a job doing data science work at a startup?
I think a lot of people have this question. It’s interesting that it’s common given how hard it is to find a quality data scientist. I sent back an email which looked more or less like the following post - these are my thoughts on how to get hired, as seen from the eyes of someone who actually really wants to find more talented data scientists to hire.
Quantitative intuition The first thing that I’m looking for is general quantitative sense. This is a really low bar. It’s not really important whether someone knows the quirks of Cauchy distributions or whatever.……