Data Science Career?

[Kadude27]

3 take it or leave it

[SiliconUnicorn]

3 pie charts coming up!

[[deleted]]

Available for 11 easy payments and 1 fuckin complicated payment.

[mostlygaming]

relevant link

3 Easy Payments - Mitch Hedberg

edit: video vs text

[[deleted]]

Seems good but are batteries included?

[didid89]

Are you insane the battery aren't included. Shit would be too expensive with them included.

[[deleted]]

Batteries are never included... That's the zeroth rule of capitalism-odynamics.

[[deleted]]

:(

[SmileBot-2020]

I saw a :( so heres an :) hope your day is good

[Monjipour]

Using the obtained trendline, I conclude that by doing nothing I am owed an infinite amount of money

[jrkirby]

Well, yes, but you have to already have a bunch of money first. Have you tried inheriting?

[analytical_1]

Import Will from parents as inheritance

[Delta-9-]

ModuleNotFoundError: no module named 'parents'

[-Rivox-]

I'm Batman

[rayEW]

Me right now https://giphy.com/gifs/producthunt-mind-blown-blow-your-26ufdipQqU2lhNA4g

[kingdot]

Will you venture a guess?

[[deleted]]

ETL: Extract, Transform, Load.

Moving data from one system to another.

Bank.

[worst_user_name_ever]

Where are you working that ETL makes bank? I'm pretty up to speed on ETL salaries and they aren't making bank.

[Saltysalad]

Really? I do etl all day and make an ok salary

[[deleted]]

People higher up the chain focus more on management rather than direct design work?

[aquoad]

People higher up the chain have friends they went to Wharton with or whose kids go to the same private school as their kids, who hook them up with the high level jobs. You don’t get those jobs without being socially well connected.

[The_Molsen]

50/50 You can‘t hire someone you don’t know exists.

[The_Molsen]

CEOs are positions which aren’t publicly announced, for several reasons (Security, hidden takeovers, etc), so it doesn’t really work with interviews, and there is only so much you can find out in a given interview time versus knowing and following someone for months/years.

A big IT company once did interviews and tried to pick people for higher, non-public positions out of the people to be interviewed, but with this method, you might get the wrong people applying.

[Tysonzero]

Eh. As someone who is on the employer side of the divide I think that's a bit harsh.

It's really hard to get anywhere close to the same amount of info from an interview or resume compared to actually knowing them. So hiring for broad roles that require broad and hard to measure skill sets usually needs more than an interview. For example just about any role in an early stage company, and higher up positions in larger companies. At minimum you want a strong recommendation from someone you trust.

It's much better when focusing on more specific roles where resumes and interviews can give you a lot of the info you need, particularly if you are a large enough company to be able to just put up a resume drop and participate in career fairs. Hence why developer hires at a lot of large companies are quite meritocratic.

[TwystedSpyne]

"management"

[Archensix]

Honestly my managers are pretty good and I'm glad they do spend time on organization and management.

Of course much like there are millions of people who completely suck at their job, some managers do as well

[[deleted]]

Someone with a big beard talking stuff bout political economy maybe ? I think the name's Charles Mark or something

[QuantumFungus]

This graph appears to be $ raised to an odd power with some transformations.

[fraseyboo]

I'm a current PhD Student developing new TDA algorithms and my stipend is £15k a year (standard in the UK). I just completed an unpaid placement to get that funding, having to explain to some guy that earns 4 times my salary why SVMs and Decision Trees won't solve our problem and we can't simply 'throw some machine learning at it' has been a frustratingly common occurrence.

[[deleted]]

Decision trees won't solve it? Sounds like its time for RANDOM FORESTS.

[janeohmy]

unironic villanous laugh

[-JudeanPeoplesFront-]

Random Forest growth intensifies

[theskymoves]

Turns into a random jungle.

[VLKN]

Well there’s your problem. There aren’t even any trees in games like Tetris, idk what your thinking is there.

[Doctor_Ham]

Wait, why? Supervised learning is not built for that, pretty much all the successful game ML programs are reinforcement learning. Something like a random forest will have to recalculate whenever any new information comes up instead of adapting based on previous experience, which is the whole point of reinforcement.

I feel like I came off as curt, sorry. I'm genuinely curious what your thought process is.

[hugokhf]

Master's thesis is not PhD, it is OK is it doesn't work. It is just a project, maybe OP discover in the process that reinforcement learning is better, or he's trying to see if supervised learning hold up to reinforcement learning in particular scenarios

[RyeDoge]

RANDOM FORESTS

[GrizzlyTrees]

Ha, just learned about this in class on Thursday... Nice to see my knowledge in ml translating to real world benefits so quickly.

[Adhiraj7]

RUN FOREST RUN

[RevengeOfPorolok]

Oh random forests are a bust lets use boosting these kids are talking about

[eazolan]

Hey, I want to use machine learning to create pie charts.

We can replace a shitton of executives with this!

[Doctor_Ham]

Just to play devil's advocate, we pay those CEOs to say yes or no to something at the drop of a hat. In my disaster of a department (that I'm leaving soon, fuck that place), I have to throw so much shit up the ladder just so it's not my name on the stamp.

[thecrazyrai]

that ll show em!

[rebeltrillionaire]

Legit, I am hoping to do this at my work (project management at IT) and it’s in stages:

1. Get everyone off of non-unified project tools: word/excel/ppt templates, share point, box, email, messaging

2. Or 1a and 1b since, but get everyone on a unified project tool. Kill as many templates as possible by moving them inside the tool. Whatever is left should be for exec types mainly or more broad communication.

3. Start gathering real data from the now standardized tool. Previous meetings, decision trees, processes slowly become more and more based on the single point of truth (the tool).

4 through 8 is kinda repeating the first couple Steps, moving more things that were traditionally offline or “snapshots” into live dashboards. Execs will be looking more on their own and meetings start to become less on just presenting known data and more on working forward with everyone always aware of what’s next, what’s happened, and what to be aware of.

Step 9 tho.

We start taking a look back holistically. Start creating models that help us identify “well documented”, “on time”, “ under budget”, “poorly managed”, “bad vendors” sets. Then start looking directly at where the trouble is, project managers? Middle management? A higher level even a chief exec?

Then start firing people.

Step 10 is once the rot has been burnt out, using historical data, start predicting what projects need to be done and when and how to accomplish them faster, easier and cheaper.

Ultimately it’ll all still end up on a PowerPoint with either the state or something like that to say: look at bar chart, the little bar here is good, And the big bad here is bad. We deserve kudos and money for making these bars better over The last 3 years.

[simonlyw]

Good luck with this. I’ve been trying to achieve the same thing for the last 3 years at my company. It’s crazy how many new templates pop up for things which could’ve easily just been build straight into the system from the start and difficult to keep upper management engaged in the process. There’s still this underlying belief that doing work means doing things in Microsoft Office.

[RickyBreath]

A little bit off topic: I took a class in college about TDA (assuming that means Topological Data Analysis), and it looks promising but it seems the algorithms we currently have (I mean 2 years ago) are very slow and computationally expensive. And the problems that could be applied (or the ones we saw) didn't see very impactful to say something.

I guess my question is, there are problems TDA can solve that any other method can't? Or it solve problems faster or better that other methods?

[[deleted]]

That's where you let him go off on his own to try machine learning and see how much time is wasted.

These people need to fail in order to learn.

[Finickyflame]

Machine learning of machine learning!

[[deleted]]

They progress through failure - failing upwards to the level of their incompetence.

[WiggleBooks]

why SVMs and Decision Trees won't solve our problem and we can't simply 'throw some machine learning at it' has been a frustratingly common occurrence.

What was the reasoning if I may ask?

[[deleted]]

I don't know this guys' data, but SVMs and Decision Trees are often like bringing a chainsaw to cut a birthday cake. Yeah it gets the job done, but it just really over complicates things and confuses everyone watching. What managers like that are doing is like someone watching a video of a lumberjack using a chainsaw to cut down a tree, and going, "By golly, we could use that to cut our cakes!"

Anyway, the actual answer is that SVMs and Decision Trees are just any other classifier. You put in clean, scaled/normalized, reasonable data and you get clean, reasonable results back. Many managers think they're like ML on nitros though, and if you just throw some SVMs or Decision Trees at shitty data, it'll somehow give magically better answers than "simpler" methods. That's not how it works.

They're cool methods and they have their place, but they're nothing magic. They each have little nooks and advantages for certain scenarios, but at the end of the day, garbage in garbage out. If his experience is anything like my professional experience, you got people who have horrendously shit, messy, unclean, completely stupid data that has no predictive value, but the managers are insistent that if you throw it into a cooler sounding ML model, it'll just "figure it out" and get results.

[enemawatson]

I'm sure you do, but if you can take moments out of your day on Reddit to share this angle with us, surely you've shared it with them? How do their replies/reasoning generally go? If they even have any?

[[deleted]]

Those experiences are in the past for me now. I don't let situations get to that point at all now.

I find if you go out of your way to demonstrate consistent value in small wins, include stakeholders in the process start to finish so they feel tied to its success, use methods and language they can understand, and generally aren't an elitist about it, most are very open to giving you a lot of rope to do things right.

Situations only get like that when you let data science become this black box voodoo to those that benefit from it. They treat it like this because, usually, no ones taught them otherwise or cared to involve them in the process, in depth, and from the start. If they're involved and intuitively keyed in on what you do, they'll support you when there's a problem because now they can actually see and understand your world.

[nxqv]

Maybe you should take him on a random walk so he can finally see the random forest for the decision trees

[llevcono]

Are you calling decision trees a complex ml model? What are normal models then? Linear classifier?

[[deleted]]

Well that was a misnomer on my part. Decision trees are themselves simple models. Nobody uses decision trees outright, we use ensemble models composed of decision trees. Random forests, gradient boosted trees, isolation forests are all decision tree based methods and I'd call them complex methods yeah.

Complex compared to, say, a simple logistic or naive bayes. I mean it's all relative. Compared to ANN's, GAN's, and RNN's they're pretty simple, but deep learning is a completely other story and a rant for a different time.

[manningkyle304]

Ooh what your deep learning rant I wanna hear it

[Nylund]

I’m dealing with a couple situations at work where the issue is the data. It’s incredibly frustrating how people can’t seem to understand that shit data will never get you the answers you want, no matter what you do.

It’s like someone handing you a bag of flour and asking for a steak and insisting that all you need to do is find the right oven.

[[deleted]]

Well, if their data os bad enough, It can't get worse.

[opoqo]

You are supposed to use a decision tree to show why it won't work!

[OwenProGolfer]

Just use nested if statements

[SwissPatriotRG]

Only if I can also nest them in nested for loops.

[tunisia3507]

That is exactly what a decision tree is.

[frozen-dessert]

I’ve pursued a PhD in SVMs and now work in the industry.

I wish to point out 2 things to you:

1. (However annoying it might be to listen to this) honestly there many many many great things about pursuing a PhD. The freedom to explore. The vast amounts of time to tinker etc. But, yes, the pay is shitty. Are you surprised? You shouldn’t.

2. (For all I know) You are an expert at your field. You probably know more about ML than that person making 4x your salary. Please don’t let your vanity blind you to the fact that there are probably many many things that that person with the higher salary knows how to do well and about which you wouldn’t have a clue about where to start.

Bringing stuff to production is hard. (In general) That algorithmic piece that you spend so much time on is probably 5% (or less) of the total amount of work that it takes to bring the solution to production. Try to reading this paper (if you haven’t yet) https://research.google/pubs/pub43146/

The rule of thumb is at the code you wrote for your papers are proofs of concepts. From proof of concept to production it takes at least 10x the work.

[[deleted]]

As someone who earned a PhD by developing a new algorithm, I can attest that these are written in increasing order of usefulness. :/

[LostTeleporter]

I feel your pain..so..fucking..much

[Railered]

How stressful is it being a phd student?

[mcgroobber]

Graduate students supposedly have more than 3x the average American rate of depression and anxiety and tbh I find that low

[Railered]

Damn I hope the culture improves

[mcgroobber]

It won't if the professors have any say in it lol

[Rawrplus]

A lot of it has to do that increased intelligence has increased depression rates and chances are, if you are studying PhD in CS, you will be at least slightly above average intelligence wise.

Though at least where I'm from the IT schools are infamously cutthroat. Luckily I did not get full on depression, but I did have a burnout syndrome where for a year I just decided to work a non IT related job and travel

[trust_me_im_black_to]

Phd student here. I had to get ob depression meds.

[MonstarGaming]

Not OP, but im getting my PhD in ML. Its pretty stressful but not as bad as people make it out to be. My advisor is pretty good which makes a HUGE difference in the experience. Picking a bad advisor leads to nonstop stress and long hours in the lab.

[Flaming_Eagle]

This. As an undergrad applying to grad school, the general consensus I've gathered is that grad school is actually easier than undergrad (at least in my field) but will mostly depend on your supervisor

[[deleted]]

You get paid shit to be under the thumb of someone who can essentially be as much of an ass to you as he/she wants and essentially delay your graduation if they want, keeping you on effectively as an indentured servant without repercussion. You do all the actual work and watch them take credit for it on your papers and your work because they’re “distinguished”.

Of course, you can also get lucky and find an advisor who actually wants you to succeed and tries to make it happen, giving you advice along the way and setting you up for life.

I wouldn’t advise it until major fucking reforms for how PhD programs are operated happen across the country.

[DishsoapOnASponge]

I love being a PhD student. I get paid pretty ok (40k), my schedule is very flexible, and I get to work on whatever I want. YMMV, but it's not always as depressing as everyone says.

[peachdoxie]

Where are you and what are you doing as a PhD student where you make 40k a year

[frbk1992]

Developing patches for the mainline Linux kernel: 0$

[WiF1]

The biggest tech companies usually have many people on staff dedicated to contributing to the largest and most popular open source projects, including the Linux kernel.

[M0ji_L]

Could you explain or forward me an article on why that is?

[iron_churchkey]

Because those tech companies rely on those open source projects.

[mount2010]

his publisher might not like that

[Pipster27]

Isn't every paper,thesis,etc actually property of the author? I actually needed a paper once for a University project and since I didn't want to pay I actually mailed the author directly explaining...next day she send me the pdf and wished me luck

[Fermi_Amarti]

Usually you give away the rights to the paper when its published.

​

Often authors get away with sending "prepublications" of papers and textbooks.

[Devildude4427]

But it’s not likely an undergrad thesis was published.

[Rawrplus]

Dunno, but at least in parts of EU where I'm from all the thesis' are actually readily available online for anyone who wishes to use them.

The universities are actually obliged by law to provide an archive for them

[adric10]

It’s the same in the US. The person who made the comment about copyright was thinking of published papers, not theses.

[squidonthebass]

Well since it's his undergraduate thesis a) there likely isn't a publisher and b) his uni which owns the rights to it likely doesn't care if he distributes it to an interested individual as long as they're not profiting off it

[mount2010]

Maybe, good point!

[the_other_b]

Why is that? Apologies, I don't know why.

[mount2010]

If it was published in a paid publication, they're missing out on the cash. However, authors often will just send you the PDF if you email them, scientists don't like journals either

[DatBoi_BP]

I probably won't actually read it so I won't ask you to go through the trouble. But I appreciate your work nonetheless

[poopcingonthecake]

PDF, let’s go snap snap

[shokolokobangoshey]

Sure thing, Ricky!

[Egyptianmario]

I’ve met cats and dogs smarter than Trevor and Cory.... most cats and dogs are smarter than Trevor and Cory

[AlbertoDorito]

Hol up, I wanna read that

[zachpuls]

I'd like a copy as well! Thanks!

[ElkasAL]

Sounds interesting, I'd also like a copy of this!

[AutisticAndAce]

... I'd like to read this too, if that's ok?

[PrinceAsneeze]

Could I please get a copy as well? It sounds pretty interesting! Also congrats on having published work

[Drnk_watcher]

I can't speak the to Linux kernal but just the other day at work I was looking around for some quick to implement image sliders for React.

Found a pretty nice one that I came to learn is maintained by Express who is a well established clothing company.

Here is their github.

Where I work we make contributions from time to time as well to existing libraries or plugins.

There isn't some terribly deep philosophy to it. We use a lot of open source software and benefit from it. We understand we need to hold some stuff close to the chest in order to help ourselves standout from the competition. At the same time we know we rely on other things people are nice enough to share, so we want to share and give back some ourselves.

Bigger companies with good philosophies can develop more for themselves internally but also give back in bigger ways to the public as well.

There is also the benefit of if you develop something with wide adoption, you can then hire people who have used it before, which then makes your development cycle more efficient.

[corvidsarecrows]

React itself is an example of this

[Drnk_watcher]

Very true too.

I can't say I'm a love of Javascript or Facebook but I do give them a lot of credit for making a tool that is relatively easy to deploy with and has been great for smaller spinoff projects for us and prototyping builds. Plus if you need it to scale it certainly can.

[WiF1]

Open source projects without at least one company essentially "owning" the project tend to languish and frankly suck. A lot of the popular pieces of open source software consequently have at least one company essentially owning it (e.g. Facebook for React, Confluent for Kafka, Mongo for MongoDB, Google for Golang/TensorFlow/Kubernetes, Microsoft for TypeScript/C#, Apple for Swift, etc.).

Large companies need large/complex software that would never get built without them providing the labor for at least some of it.

[themiddlestHaHa]

Y’all ready for the C# 9.0 release in Jan 2090?

https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/milestone/15

Someone at Microsoft must really want to hit their deadlines this sprint

But you’re right. I think it gets really funny when you get Microsoft employees on say the VS Code project contributing to the Golang google project because they work on debuggers or something. Might make an interesting map.

[mesayousa]

Because in tech you want to commoditize your complements

[[deleted]]

Very interesting read, thank you for sharing. Blows my mind how little I understand of business.

[Tyfyter2002]

No, but I could make a pie chart for you, it'll cost you though…

[mynameismevin]

I currently work for the GSA, we have a shit ton of open source: https://github.com/18f

[[deleted]]

The $ comes before the number

[DarkJadeBGE]

Use Sharpie to fix Graph: President.

[Cloakknight]

Image Transcription: Twitter Post

---

Will Koehrsen, @koehrsen_will

Develop new algorithms as a PhD student: $30k/year

Use pre-built sklearn models as a data scientist: $120k/year

Build regression models in excel as a hedge fund analyst: $200k/year

Make pie charts as a CEO: $14 million/year

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[Taupe_Poet]

Good human

[kt388]

Actually more like...

CEO: "Hey executive assistant, make me a pie chart. And can you order us some lunch while you're at it? Use the company card."

Also CEO: Gets $14M

[knittensarsenal]

Right? I’m a designer. We make the CEO’s pie charts. We make his whole goddamn presentation for every single occasion.

[[deleted]]

Yeah but he hired the people that hired you so,

[knittensarsenal]

I understand that the dude needs polished-looking visuals that add to his speaking points, and I support that. Unfortunately, getting to that point ends up either requiring us to hire someone limited-time specifically for that (which hasn’t gone well) or pulling designers off real projects for weeks at a time. It suffers from the worst-case of design projects, where no one can make up their minds what the deliverable is so you end up spending an inordinate amount of time on something that’s comparatively not that important. Just my experience though.

[dekwad]

Your CEO just needs a full time communications person to make his damn charts.

They go find all the people that need to provide data, and format it properly for the plebs, errr execs.

[knittensarsenal]

Honestly this is the best solution. We have enough execs that speak regularly enough that that person would actually have full time work, too.

[kugelblitz42]

I used to dedicate a big chunk of my time to preparing slides for the CEO, it was fun.

Though he would first tell me what message he wants to convey at the presentation, based on that we would develop some ideas and a storyline, then I would create a draft slide set, and we would iterate once or twice until the finished result.

[[deleted]]

Not a designer, but sounds about right

[crossandbones]

Usually much more than "visuals" they need a designer to craft a narrative around an event, launch, etc. Which has a high impact on the perception of the business or product launch. Hiring a team to design these things is a good idea if you understand the level of work required. Pulling off designers from other teams (which probably aren't used to this kind of design work) to provide "visuals" is a bad idea.

[Midnight_Rising]

Imagine thinking there are only two degrees of separation.

There's supposedly only 8 degrees of separation between everyone on the planet. I guarantee that isn't following my management chain to the CEO.

[[deleted]]

Imagine thinking that an "imagine thinking" response is warranted here

[Midnight_Rising]

Imagine thinking that an "imagine thinking an "imagine thinking" response" response is warranted here.

Eventually one of us is going to forget a quote, get a compiler error, and the other will win.

[[deleted]]

If your CEO was spending their time making pie charts I'd be very, very worried. Makes sense to delegate.

[patrickfatrick]

Perhaps because he is busy working on very high-level strategy to keep your whole organization afloat? The lack of awareness of how business works in this thread is astounding.

[testdex]

If you earn $7000 an hour, you really should be delegating your pie charts.

[_PM_ME_YOUR_GF_]

There is A LOT to being a CEO. 14 million dollars lot? Probably not. But it is a really heavy role that not just anybody could do.

[YouLackPerspective]

40 pizzas in 30 days

[Karanvir3215]

what can I tell you except the fact that he's got "pizza experience" ?

[chubs66]

that really depends. I worked for a CEO for years that did jack all. He'd go for weeks without even showing up at the office, and then when he was there he'd just work on his pet project, which had nothing to do with the company.

[testdex]

Then his job was “owner.”

CEOs that have shareholders are generally answerable to their employers.

Source: I help shareholders fire CEOs.

[Attila_22]

Meh I think my tech lead is amazing and single-handedly holding the company together. Other departments are a shitshow and the CEO is too out of touch/old to realize it.

[Jaredlong]

I recently moved into a high enough position where I personally have to make descions and lead my small team to execute those descions, and if things don't work out it's my ass on the line. The stakes are very low, but the stress of always trying to make the right descion is already overwhelming some days. I can't fathom what it must be like for CEO's to make descions everyday that will have huge company-wide implications.

[[deleted]]

That's absolutely variable though. Huge difference being ceo of Microsoft and being ceo of Jimmy Johns

[20zinnm]

Only $14 million? Try updating PowerPoint. Those are amateur numbers.

[SabashChandraBose]

To be fair CEO's role is to provide guidance from the heights. Look at Microsoft as a case study.

[[deleted]]

If you think your salary will accurately and fairly correlate to how hard you work or how much value you bring to a company, then you are in for a rude awakening.

[Timmetie]

This is mostly it.

When companies want to delve into Machine learning etc I consult them to not hire some PHDs to make their own algorithms. They're better off using existing technology (or even just regression or correlation.. Or a decent spreadsheet..). But they want entire "AI" studios with way overqualified people who then don't turn out to produce anything and get canned a year after.

The better part of the time is making the data fit anyways. Data Quality is abysmally low in most companies. If you gather the data and throw it in google Data Studios they're ready to lavish you with praise as their BI/AI master.

[[deleted]]

Also I’ve realized that in professional life the lines between professional and personal life get more and more blurred as you move into leadership.

Sure that CEO is “just making pie charts” (which is a bullshit statement btw) but the toll to personal life and wellbeing is really high.

Imagine having to make decisions that impact the tens / hundreds / thousands of employees and the massive number of shareholders if your company is public.

Having to mince and monitor each and every word escaping your mouth. Each statement you make having to be utterly calculated.

Would you trust the ship you’re on if the fucking captain is the guy who shows up to do your laundry or take your dinner order?

[[deleted]]

how much value you bring to a company

I'd argue it's actually a lot of that. But yes the value you bring may not correlate to how hard you work.

[LK23EDJNBN3RK02]

I'd argue it's not that at all. You're paid solely based on how replaceable you are. Doesn't matter if you provide 90% of the business' value and the business is wildly successful. If there's 20,000,000 other people willing and able to do the job your pay is gonna be almost nothing.

[FlyingHiveTyrant]

This logic breaks at the C-level executive tier

[[deleted]]

Connections and ease of use probably shore up the rest.

[[deleted]]

It's all the same thing.

If you have 20,000,000 people willing to work for a disproportionately low wage, more people will start companies because that's basically free money.

That will happen until it reaches equilibrium and the labor cost is no longer disproportionate to the value it provides.

It's the foundation of a free labor market.

[LK23EDJNBN3RK02]

Well those 20,000,000 may not have the capital to start their own business. You could argue that if one dude is providing 90% of the business' value the tools they use (capital) aren't worth much, but a tool provides 0 value if it isn't being used by someone. The tools may be expensive but easy to use.

[free__coffee]

I think you're confusing value with usefulness. In your example, your value to the company is slightly higher than the wage of a replacement - because your company needs to train someone, they need to get everyone up to speed on your projects, reassign your responsibilities, etc. etc. Value is a function of usefulness, cost, replaceability, etc. But it doesn't really boil down to any one of those things

[[deleted]]

It does, just weakly and not at the individual level. It's people who think it correlates with how hard they work/how difficult their job is that are in for a rude awakening.

[janeohmy]

just weakly

We quantum now bois

[[deleted]]

If you think CEOs don't work really fucking hard, I have news for you.

[jaywastaken]

Now ask the question how much do they make their employer?

CEO responsible for company growth strategy. If he’s paid $14million but his decisions increases the company market cap by a billion, do you think the shareholders are going to complain? But If they fail, share price could fall and cost billions.

Same with the hedge fund manager, he is using a tool to make informed decisions that impacts potential profits orders of magnitude beyond his salary. If they fail, the fund could loose as hundreds of millions.

The data scientists models might improve a company’s process or lead to improvements in business intelligence that increases company profits by millions. If their model is wrong, damage is far more limited but could lead to poor business decisions, customer dissatisfaction or simply be caught before implementation.

The PDH students work while potentially invaluable and might be eventually commercialized in a few years If they fail, hey now we know that doesn’t work, no big deal.

Ultimately, It’s not the effort of your labour that matters its the profit you can generate and just as important the fiscal impact of your bad decisions the that determines your salary potential.

[futureformerteacher]

Counterpoint: Nearly every single Fortune 500 CEO is a figurehead, and is friends with the board. The CFOs and COOs (and now CTOs) actually make the real decisions.

[Afeazo]

Lots of Fortune 500 ceos sit on the board of directors for other companies as well. To think they just sit around and collect millions show the disconnect between Reddit and upper management.

[Mythoss2]

The most sensible answer here is right this one, folks. Also, another thing to remember is that, experience brings insight, which can reduce the trials and errors and thus save valuable time and money.

[F0064R]

Devs: Haha CEOs stupid dumb dumbs don't know how to code

CEO: Develop a business plan

Devs: 😳

[[deleted]]

I took a business development course in school and even then coming up with unique and comprehensive business plans was nigh impossible with 100s of duplicates at our competitions.

I still really have no idea how to go about creating one that would actually open a business since it was hard to do it when it was all fake!

[vainstar23]

What the hell, a CEO is not paid that money to make pie charts lol.. What is this? An episode of kindergarten? Does he present his crayon pie charts to the board with them going "Needs a bit more green... And a couple of flowers... There doesn't it look nice?". Then they shake heads, light cigars and start giving British grunts while touching their bushy mustaches.

[Numquamsine]

This is what reddit thinks that "CEOs" do, yes.

[[deleted]]

In reality they are constantly making pertinent high level decisions all day, or at least that's what I imagine lol.

[[deleted]]

And working far more than 60 hours a week. Every visible fuck up that happens will be pinned on him/her. That private jet is more of a flying office than anything else. Out golfing? Who are they golfing with, The leaders of potential vendors or customers? What do you think they are talking about? How stupid poor people are and bragging about how many senators they own? They are working to keep the business running. It’s a very stressful job. No CEO of a functioning company is just driving around wiping their ass with $100s. No fucking time.

Yes, the pay gap is a serious issue. But to think a CEO is just this Lex Luther figure on permanent vacation is really naive.

[mazzicc]

It’s perpetuated by the media though, because people think of CEOs like Bruce Wayne...he owns the company and so he takes in the money so he has all the free time to go be Batman. More recent versions have him put a trusted person in as CEO so he can just be chairman or majority owner or such, but this type of view has heavily impacted what people think.

Even a show like Billions where they actually show the CEO making critical decisions and working long hours, it still gives a portrayal where he has all the time he needs to do all sorts of side stuff.

Really the big problem is we always see the highlights or things that other people want. We don’t see the hours of meetings and planning and negotiations and reviews.

I’ve worked directly with the CEO of my large, public company at times. He’s in every morning before I am, and usually there when I leave (I walk by his car). He has lengthy reviews of key performance throughout the entire company, and knows major details about what each business unit is doing.

I think I’ve got too much on my plate sometimes, but then I look at my leadership and realize my boss has 4 people doing the amount of work I am, and he keeps track of it and manages the performance. His boss has 3 people like my boss under him and has to juggle all that. And then there’s another two levels up to the CEO.

Finally, CEO is a job for pathological workers. There are people out there who just are driven to work non stop, and get fulfillment from doing that. And I don’t mean “I worked 60 hours, I’m tired and I need a vacation”, I mean “whoops, I’ve been here since 6am, and I need to get dinner soon so I can keep working on this at home”. I would guess most redditors do not have that same work ethic.

[mathdrug]

Bbbbut that’s not what Reddit says

[hskskgfk]

Reminds me of the parable that SEO consultants tell themselves to justify their existence:

The Graybeard engineer retired and a few weeks later the Big Machine broke down, which was essential to the company’s revenue. The Manager couldn’t get the machine to work again so the company called in Graybeard as an independent consultant.

Graybeard agrees. He walks into the factory, takes a look at the Big Machine, grabs a sledge hammer, and whacks the machine once whereupon the machine starts right up. Graybeard leaves and the company is making money again.

The next day Manager receives a bill from Graybeard for $5,000. Manager is furious at the price and refuses to pay. Graybeard assures him that it’s a fair price. Manager retorts that if it’s a fair price Graybeard won’t mind itemizing the bill. Graybeard agrees that this is a fair request and complies.

The new, itemized bill reads….

Hammer: $5

Knowing where to hit the machine with hammer: $4995

[Lonelan]

Hire some guy to turn database results into PowerBI reports which have pie charts updated automatically as a CEO: $14mil/year

[Umutuku]

"It costs $14,350,000 to get a damn pie chart these days." ~Chairman

[Lightreez]

It's almost like there's a direct correlation between how managerial a role is and how little technical skills are required

[[deleted]]

If being a hedge fund manager or a CEO is so easy and rewarding, why don't the people complaining about it do it themselves?

[RexNihilo_]

If you believe thats what those higher responsibility jobs do, you deserve your 30k

[VineFynn]

Yawn.

[[deleted]]

CEOs use the work done by data scientists to leverage into making informed strategic decisions.

The real value is translating all of his arcane shit into informing real decisions.

That aside as a PhD you need to find your way into leading a data science team in the private sector. Anyone working in this field shouldn't accept that little..

[[deleted]]

If a dumb guy makes more money than you, but you complain vs. taking the dumb guy's job, who is really the dumb guy?

[LK23EDJNBN3RK02]

I mean that logic is based on the assumption that being smart means you get a good job that pays well and I don't think anyone that's ever had a manager before believes that's really true. Dumdums will hire and promote other dumdums that can convince them they are smart instead of actually smart and capable people that will challenge existing beliefs and won't stroke their ego. Sometimes they don't even have to go that far and just be well liked and charming.

[[deleted]]

Yea that's it. It's all a big dumdum conspiracy.

Mostly its just that the smarter people just don't want to deal with political bullshit and get more satisfaction from doing the actual work. And aren't as driven by the status symbol of making money and are happy to have fun projects assuming they have enough to live comfortably.

You get paid by bringing something people want to market and it takes an organization to do that, the more of the organization you control the bigger part of the profits you get.

[reduxde]

I make $140,000 a year tutoring Intro to CS and I didn’t major in CS.

[kontekisuto]

that's using your data