sam
I am doing a school project and i need to interview a computer scientist.
Please help me out
if you know or are a computer scientist please ask them to answer these questions or answer these if you are a computer scientist
thanks for your help.
1. What is your description of the job?
2. What advice would you give me for this career?
3. What encouraged you to do this career?
4. What do you like and dislike about your career?
5. What types of training?
6. What strengths I need or what traits?
7. How long did it take to find your job?
8. Any hidden expenses like insurance?
9. What are your work hours?
10. What is the average celery?
11. What are your duties?
12. What is the average work day like?
13. Is there different types of ranks in your career field?
14. What encouraged you to be in this career?
15. Would you ever switch careers if so why?
16. College
· Where did you go?
· How many years of school?
· What made you choose your college?
· What GPA is required?
· How many internships did you take?
· Would you rather have gone to a different college?
17. Anything else I should know about your career? #computer #video-games #electronics
2 answers
Darrin Deeter
Darrin’s Answer
Wow, this is a very in-depth question. As you may be aware the role of Data Scientist is relatively new and becoming more popular in the last 2 years or so. Being a new role it also means many different things in different companies. For the most part people in this role have a strong statistics background and a particular business specialty such as logistics, financial risk, marketing etc. I am not strictly speaking a Data Scientist, instead I have spent most of my career in Data Management. Data management is more focused on collecting, cleansing and storing data for later use. Data Scientist spend more of their time on gleaming new knowledge by analyzing data.
What advice would you give me for this career? If you like these answers and the others you get on this topic, Go For It....
What encouraged you to do this career? I went into a technology career because of a seventh grade teacher I had who introduced me to software development. Thank you Miss Barron.
What do you like and dislike about your career? It is a field with a high-degree of change, always something new to learn and build, which I enjoy. There are days when the work can be tedious or filled with meetings.
What types of training? An undergraduate in Math/Statistics or Computer Science. An advanced degree in Statistics/Math and or a business specialty, including for some a PHD. within those programs you will learn a lot about analyzing data to spot trends, outliers, make predictions etc. The tools available for doing this work will involve some amount of development, but not the traditional sort of applications. This field needs to accumulate a massive amount of data, organize it for use and then explore/visualize it.
What strengths I need or what traits? Curiosity. detail oriented. organized. like working in small teams or on your own. presentation skills
How long did it take to find your job? I started my first job right after College. I have since worked for five other companies (lots of change)
Any hidden expenses like insurance? Not unless you are working for yourself when you may want to consider liability coverage.
What are your work hours? varies but core hours are usually 8-5. There can be times when much longer days are required to complete a critical analysis.
What is the average salary? probably from 70 to 140k based on the usual variables such as company size, location and experience
What are your duties? explorer, anthropoligist, problem solver, presenter, convincer, coach
What is the average work day like? A combination of meetings to plan work and digging through data to find patterns and hidden trends.. and once in a while, the victory of finding a way to modify the business practice to either reduce expenses or increase sales/revenue, putting that story together and convincing others that a particular change should be made.
Is there different types of ranks in your career field? For sure. There are entry level positions and very senior positions that require a PHD in a very specialized field. Most companies still only have a relatively small number(2-5 in Fortune 100 company) of people in this role at the advanced end.
What encouraged you to be in this career?
Would you ever switch careers if so why? I haven't in over 20 years so far.
College
· Where did you go? Ferris State University (BA) and Wayne State University (MBA) both in Michigan
· How many years of school? 5 years for two bachelor degrees and another 4 years for the masters with a break in between of about 8 years
· What made you choose your college?
· What GPA is required? There may not be a consistent answer for this, but a 3.5 or above should get you an interview
· How many internships did you take? I did not have an internship
· Would you rather have gone to a different college? No, I was very happy with my time at both universities.
Anything else I should know about your career? There is no better time to pursue a Data career. The decisions you help make can have a huge impact on companies in every industry.
I hope you find this useful, it would be great to see a summary of the answers you collect.. maybe you will find a correlation that surprises everyone... let me know if you have any follow-up questions.
Thank you for your help!
sam
Robert Vincent
Robert’s Answer
I got my first paying Computer job in 1998 as a Unix System Administrator. Now I'm a Devops Senior Manager. I'll answer your questions in the context of my particular field, but other people working in different computer fields might answer differently.
1. What is your description of the job?
I help write and maintain the programs that set up new computers in "cloud" environments such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Platform (GCP), or Microsoft Azure.
2. What advice would you give me for this career?
Browse the job boards for positions you'd like to fill, get a list of the most frequently required skills, and learn as much as you can about each one of them.. Don't wait for someone to teach you; nearly everything you need is available as a free download, or at least a free trial. Get a little hands-on experience so that when someone asks if you have experience in such-and-such tool, you can confidently answer "Yes I do".
3. What encouraged you to do this career?
I love working with computers, but I hate repetitive tasks. This field lets me learn new things almost every day, and get paid doing it.
4. What do you like and dislike about your career?
Everything moves very quickly. I'm often reminded of the Red Queen's race: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race
I like this, because it challenges me to learn new things and keep my mind fresh. But as I'm getting older, my mind is moving slower, and eventually I won't be able to keep up anymore. At some point, I'll have to stop managing computer programs and start managing people, instead.
5. What types of training?
In my experience, the best way to learn anything is by doing. I love reading about new tools and technology, but as a married middle-aged man, I don't have time to learn them all willy-nilly. So I put each one on a virtual "shelf" until I see a matching real-world problem that needs solving. If you're young and have more time, there's always https://www.codecademy.com/ and https://www.khanacademy.org/
6. What strengths I need or what traits?
Curiosity, patience, and determination. Flex your analytical muscles. Learn as much mathematics as you can: even if you don't think you'll need the math, you'll need the skills you build by learning it.
7. How long did it take to find your job?
I was doing the job of a full-time sysadmin as an unpaid volunteer for about five years before I got my first paying job. If I were to lose my job today, I would expect to find another within two weeks.
8. Any hidden expenses like insurance?
I prefer to work as a W2 employee, but many people in my field earn a higher salary working 1099 or C2C (Corp-to-corp). To do this, you'll need to create your own corporation, which will be responsible for providing benefits such as medical insurance. This lets you move from contract to contract without the hassle of changing insurance or finding a new in-network doctor each time. But you're responsible for your own paperwork and income tax withholding.
9. What are your work hours?
When I was younger, I often worked on-call and was expected to respond within minutes to after-hours emergencies. Now I'm working for larger corporation and I'm only expected to be available from 8am to 4pm.
10. What is the average salary?
You can get that answer from places like https://salary.com/ or https://payscale.com/ or even https://glassdoor.com/
One of them says the median salary for my position is around $189,000 annual: https://www.salary.com/tools/salary-calculator/devops-senior-manager
11. What are your duties?
I write programs using Puppet, Ruby, Powershell, Bash, and other languages that install and configure programs on thousands of computers all around the world.
12. What is the average work day like?
Virtual meetings, reading and writing emails, updating job tickets, development, and testing.
13. Is there different types of ranks in your career field?
Each company handles this differently, but generally you should expect 5 to 10 percent pay increase each time you switch jobs.
14. What encouraged you to be in this career?
See answer for identically-worded #3 above.
15. Would you ever switch careers if so why?
Eventually, I expect to move into middle or upper management. If I ever retire, I'd like to teach part-time.
16. College
· Where did you go?
It doesn't really matter, because a college degree has never been required for my position.
· How many years of school?
· What made you choose your college?
· What GPA is required?
· How many internships did you take?
· Would you rather have gone to a different college?
I would have liked to attend CalTech.
17. Anything else I should know about your career?
I got my start by working as an unpaid volunteer for my church. It was great experience, which directly related to my first paying gig, and the pastors provided excellent work references.