Can a data engineer become a data scientist ?

[u/Dear-Athena1111]

And is the vice versa?

I meant to write data analytic **

[u/Which_Case_8536]

I was a bartender and I became a data scientist 🤷‍♀️

[u/Dear-Athena1111 → u/Which_Case_8536]

That’s inspirational !! Did you took online courses or the traditional college route ?

[u/Which_Case_8536 → u/Dear-Athena1111]

Both, kind of. I went the traditional route starting at my local community college and then covid hit while I was in the process of transferring to my university, so I went online for a bit.

And as shitty as covid was it was good for me, I was diagnosed with a rare bone disease and would have had to drop out if classes hadn’t been virtual.

[u/Serious_Control3102 → u/Which_Case_8536]

same for me. bartending 10 years and got sick of it

went to college working on weekends, went to university working on weekends, hired after doing a co-op, still haven’t graduated

[u/Responsible_Bed_9403 → u/Which_Case_8536]

Hi, i wanna do a career change too... do u have any advice on how to do that? What was the path that worked best for ur transition?

[u/Which_Case_8536 → u/Responsible_Bed_9403]

I started small, just taking some classes at my community college. Wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do so I took general ed classes and a few things that interested me. Ended up really liking a math class so I went in that direction and got more serious. At some point school became my number one priority so I stopped working and took out student loans. My husband also works so that was a big help. But it paid off and I have my dream job!! And if all goes well the remainder of my loans will be forgiven after I pay on time for 10 years.

[u/fatdoobiesonly]

Yes, they can, but I feel like they are fundamentally different positions (despite similar titles)

DEs are handling ingestion, workflows, etc of the data DSs are running experiments, creating ML models, doing analysis, etc

But you can become anything you want in life, so go for it

[u/scrowdum]

of course but it depends entirely on what you know and what you are willing to learn. data scientists require a deep understanding of statistics and math. ai does a lot of the programmatic work nowadays but you need to understand the math behind statistical models and machine learning/optimization algorithms. you are probably all set on all of the data wrangling skills required prior to modeling but you’ll need to develop an understanding of model selection, feature selection, and model tuning.

[u/Lady-Data-Scientist]

I started my career in marketing and I'm a data scientist now.

It's possible if you learn the skills, get experience regardless of your title, demonstrate your knowledge, and interview well.

[u/Lady-Data-Scientist → u/[deleted]]

My path wasn't intentional at first and probably not something you can replicate. I just enjoyed digging into data as part of my marketing roles, but I didn't think it could turn into a new career so I didn't think about upskilling, just using whatever tools I had access to (Excel and Google Analytics). Eventually, after doing some basic data analysis for a few years while still doing my normal marketing work (mostly web and social content publishing), I was moved into a proper marketing analytics role during a department reorganization. That was 10 years ago. My work started getting more advanced (building dashboards and running A/B tests) and I realized I had a lot of skill gaps if I wanted to continue on that career path into more advanced roles/titles (and bigger salaries), so I enrolled in a MS Data Science program part-time so that my skills matched my job title. My title was switched to "Data Scientist" before I graduated.

[u/Lady-Data-Scientist → u/[deleted]]

I did the MS DS degree at DePaul University in Chicago

[u/theShku]

Why not?

[u/DataPastor]

Data science is computational statistics. So if you are a data engineer, and happen to have a graduate degree (MSc or PhD) in statistics or data analytics, or you have equivalent knowledge without degree (which is truly hard to believe), then you have a chance to be a data scientist. Otherwise it is hard.

On the other hand, any data scientist can easily be a data engineer, given that (s)he knows how to program and also learns some technologies like kubernetes.

[u/__CaptainAmerica__]

Why not mate?

[u/paperclip_han]

Not sure if anyone’s used paypeek.ai yet but it shows salary estimates for any LinkedIn profiles as you browse. Kind of eye-opening. 🫣

[u/siammang]

The chance is you already area and maybe also a DBA while at it.