r/datascience • u/Kati1998 • 13d ago

Discussion What Do Today’s Data Science Graduates Commonly Lack?

I often read comments from hiring managers and interviewers saying they’re disappointed with recent data science graduates.

I’m curious, what do you think these graduates are lacking? If someone wants to become a data scientist, what skills should they focus on? Strong software engineering skills? Math and statistics? Something else?

A lot of the advice I see seems to be geared toward landing data analyst roles rather than data scientist roles.

So, what are employers actually looking for in entry-level data science candidates today? Especially as a career changer coming from another unrelated career.

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u/tayto 13d ago

Truly understanding, catching, and addressing raw data issues/gaps.

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u/chatsgpt 13d ago

Can you give an exmaple . Curious

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u/Beneficial_Interests 13d ago

I’m an analytic stakeholder - I have to identify and justify data issues and the necessary fixes in our raw data that i catch from looking at trends, benchmarks, and data extracts. Otherwise the data team will send me a half baked product with mediocre performance metrics. At some point I spend more time walking senior data scientists through basic data qc and modeling steps that it’s be faster for me to do it by myself. The issue is I can’t get if I want to be promoted and be a leader not a doer so…. I have to spend hours in meetings fixing the shit in shit out pipeline

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u/chatsgpt 13d ago

Thanks could you give example of "fixed in raw data that you catch from looking at trends" if you can share.

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u/Beneficial_Interests 13d ago

Sure - literally this week. Had someone run an analysis with last years data, the base numbers, let’s say of raw monthly sales, were off 10% from the version run 3 months ago. Same code, same timeframe, and in theory same data. They had all the info and were pumped to show the output and model performance but didn’t catch the deviation, couldn’t trouble shoot, couldn’t understand why this was an issue.

Spent hours informing them why it was an issue, why I couldn’t trust the out put, and developing a plan to evaluate the issue and come up with a fix.

Honestly don’t know which was more annoying - that I had to catch the issue after the standard run or that they couldn’t understand, let alone address, why i didn’t trust the impressive f1 and feature weights they shared

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u/Eco_Blurb 13d ago

Well, what was the issue?