3 Reasons You Should NOT Become a Data Scientist

Key Takeaways

hello everyone can hear back with another video for you today I'm talking about three reasons why you should not get into the data science field this past weekend I was skiing and I got into a little accident I tore a couple of the ligaments in my knee you can see my crutches back there and while I was in the hospital I kept thinking about the reasons why I go skiing and I love the thrill of the danger I love the adrenaline but all of these things can inevitably lead to harming myself or potentially harming others on the slopes now I got to thinking about data science in this frame you know why did I get into the data science field and was it for the right reasons so again in this video I'm going to talk about three reasons why you might not want to get into the data science field you know these things are your motivators or these things are you know the characteristics that you don't have perhaps this field is not for you if you enjoyed this video please hit that like button it really helps me grow my channel and if you want to see more videos at the intersection of data science and sports analytics please consider subscribing so the first reason not to get into the data science field again this is from my perspective is if you're doing it for the money yes data scientists do you make a good living I think the median salary is around $120,000 a year but if you're doing it solely for the money and you're not engaged by the process by the learning that you constantly have to do but the questions that you always have to ask you're gonna get burned out extremely fast I try not to make too many videos about the financial side of data science I know that can be kind of a hot topic it can get a lot of views but to me it's really a lot more important that you're interested in the field you're interested in the discovery or interested in tackling really cool problems and you have to have this intrinsic motivation rather than thinking about all get paid they'll get recognition which is extrinsic you should be just excited about answering those questions excited about doing the projects because they're genuinely fascinating to you okay so the second signal that perhaps data science isn't for you is that if you're uncomfortable economy or you have to come they ask others for help when you're a data scientist you're usually the expert that your company in the subject area and there might not be people that you can ask especially if you're doing original research for help solving a problem so you have to really be able to know where to look for answers on the Internet you have to be able to go back to your foundation of mathematics to try and prove some of these concepts and that can be very difficult for a lot of people I love it when people reach out to me for help solving problems or answering questions but a lot of the times some of this stuff can be solved from a pretty quick google search looking at github Stack Overflow Cabul etc and it's good to find answers on your own rather than just asking someone if you are always asking people for help I was asking them to solve your problems for you it's generally not a good practice because you don't get used to solving problems for yourself again there's always a certain point where you can need to ask for help but you should try and exhaust all the other resources before you turn to someone else so one final thought on autonomy and the need for constant direction and that is the creativity in this data science field and adventurousness is extremely important now a lot of the times business stakeholders will give you an outcome that they'd like to see we'd like to classify who is likely to purchase our product and who is not but the way that you build that algorithm the data that you use and the features that you engineer are largely up to you that is part of the creative process and this should be carried over to the projects that you do in your own time but the fun part is you get to decide what projects you're going to do what data you get to work with now I get a lot of people that say hey can what projects should I do and that bothers me a little bit because if I tell you the project to do you lose on developing that creative skill the ability to say hey this is an interesting data set and these are really interesting questions that I'd like to ask of it now it's not hard to find a product to work on you can go on Cabul you can go on Google and just search for data and when you find a dataset that you like you can ask a couple of questions of it now then after you have the question to answer you can start building models you can start with the ability in the data et cetera so again I would really recommend that you focus on cultivating this creativity and adventurous skill set or a thought process because that'll really take you a long way on your data science trip so the final reason that data science might not be for you is if you're uncomfortable with collaboration or explaining your work dollars now this might clash a little bit with the previous point which is you have to be comfortable with autonomy but at the end of the day you're always gonna have to explain your work to someone and it's usually not you that is going to be executing this or you know gonna be on the hook for the findings or the results of your project while communicating with stakeholders is extremely important I think in the future it's gonna be even more important to collaborate and to communicate with other data scientists the field in my opinion is moving towards more team-based work and if you can show that you've worked with others in projects in the past and they've had good outcomes that can be a really nice feather in your cap I would recommend if you can find people to work on personal projects with you that shows again that you have this collaborative ability and if the results are really good it's always fun to be able to share the phrase or share the great outcomes with another person as usual thank you so much for watching this video I hope you found it informative and useful I will say that regarding the reasons why you shouldn't become a data scientist they're not all set in stone these are things that you can learn to do or there are characteristics that you can change in yourself and so even if right now maybe data science isn't a good fit because of their beliefs or what you're comfortable with in the future it very well could be a field for you