Discussion
It's an unfortunate circumstance of the data science industry that people with PhDs and master's degrees are much more highly regarded and taken seriously than people who have made their own path for themselves. Which is kind of sad and really silly if you think about it, because a lot of directors and above in these big companies don't have masters or PhDs. So the standard that people have to have a master's or a PhD automatically therefore does not even make sense. You expect more of your own people than you do of your leaders....
I've been working in data science for about 3 years now, at my last company I was just an analyst working under a data science overall department, but in my current position, I finally got into a data science team. This time, doing more of the data engineering stuff but at least I got to do some natural language processing which was fun. I took a huge amount of categorical data and I split it out using Python, grouped it into tokens, created word clouds and other sentiment related data for it. So I think this is a literal function of data science, if I do say so myself. I also created a lightweight machine learning model to make predictions. It was based on TensorFlow, but I also tested with XG boost as well. Like to think that this was a data science function too
In terms of getting actual titled data scientist roles however, I keep hearing the same thing. You're going to have a hard time if you don't have a PhD, no one will take you seriously, you have no chance even if you study on Kaggle and do actual data science in your free time.
Discussion
