<story><title>Berkeley offers its data science course online for free</title><url>http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/03/29/berkeley-offers-its-fastest-growing-course-data-science-online-for-free/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mr_toad</author><text>Every job that involves data in any way is being relabeled a data science job.  Most of them are just generating dashboards and posters in Excel or Tableau for people who are data illiterate.  I know many people with maths&amp;#x2F;stats&amp;#x2F;comp-sci backgrounds who end up in these sorts of jobs.&lt;p&gt;“Just add a bunch of green up arrows and red down arrows, your manager will love it” was advice from a co-worker of mine.  Sadly, she was right.</text></item><item><author>resolaibohp</author><text>I have also found this interesting. What I don&amp;#x27;t understand is that the amount of data science jobs are no where near the levels that people make it seem. I am not sure where all these people will end up working if they want to be a data scientist. There is not a need to hire huge teams of data scientists like you might for dev roles, it doesn&amp;#x27;t scale the same way.</text></item><item><author>jamestimmins</author><text>I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wakkaflokka</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s actually become somewhat hilarious to me. Like you said, the data science label is being applied quite liberally (no judgment, I&amp;#x27;m not the world&amp;#x27;s authority on how it should be applied), so here you have companies paying $100k or more to have people do Excel work or Tableau visualizations.</text></comment>
<story><title>Berkeley offers its data science course online for free</title><url>http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/03/29/berkeley-offers-its-fastest-growing-course-data-science-online-for-free/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mr_toad</author><text>Every job that involves data in any way is being relabeled a data science job.  Most of them are just generating dashboards and posters in Excel or Tableau for people who are data illiterate.  I know many people with maths&amp;#x2F;stats&amp;#x2F;comp-sci backgrounds who end up in these sorts of jobs.&lt;p&gt;“Just add a bunch of green up arrows and red down arrows, your manager will love it” was advice from a co-worker of mine.  Sadly, she was right.</text></item><item><author>resolaibohp</author><text>I have also found this interesting. What I don&amp;#x27;t understand is that the amount of data science jobs are no where near the levels that people make it seem. I am not sure where all these people will end up working if they want to be a data scientist. There is not a need to hire huge teams of data scientists like you might for dev roles, it doesn&amp;#x27;t scale the same way.</text></item><item><author>jamestimmins</author><text>I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Natsu</author><text>In an engineering class, when dealing with a problem about factories that produce widgets and consume resources&amp;#x2F;widgets from other machines, I made a complex Excel spreadsheet that was animated to pass little numbers around that represented the items produced or consumed.&lt;p&gt;It didn&amp;#x27;t actually give correct results, I&amp;#x27;m not sure it could have worked (I needed to do two updates on the same cycle and never did figure out how), and I documented that it was buggy.&lt;p&gt;But it looked cool and I got good marks.  So my experience pretty much agrees with yours.</text></comment>