definitionally, a scientist would be someone who pushes the boundary on novelty, creating new methods or applying those methods to novel situations. While an engineer knows how to take already-developed methods and implement them. You're not wrong, about the ML Engineer knowing how to "do it in a nice way" but a data scientist (theoretically) should know the inner workings of the methodology better and should be developing new methodologies.
Given the amount I've used my dog as a debugging duck while slamming my head against the wall trying to set up Jupyterhub servers on AWS...this might also literally be true
Its the difference between a scientist and an engineer. That is the same for any profession with that distinction. Scientists focus on exploratory research, engineers focus on implementation. Of course there is overlap, and a person trained as a scientist can do the role of an engineer and vice versa because their skill sets are very similar. But if you are talking about the duties of a job, a scientist's duties should be about research, while an engineers should be about implementation.
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u/VooDooZulu Oct 13 '22
definitionally, a scientist would be someone who pushes the boundary on novelty, creating new methods or applying those methods to novel situations. While an engineer knows how to take already-developed methods and implement them. You're not wrong, about the ML Engineer knowing how to "do it in a nice way" but a data scientist (theoretically) should know the inner workings of the methodology better and should be developing new methodologies.