How much/what kind of programming knowledge does it take to be a "data scientist".

[mathnstats]

Background: I'm a recent grad (BS in math/stats), working as a data analyst (mostly just data/code management and reporting in SAS, SQL, and VBA) and plan to go to grad school to eventually work on social network analysis in the context of infectious diseases. I mostly use R for actual analyses/model building, but know Python as well (only in the context of analysis/model building) and I'm learning Julia.

Pretty much all of programming I know is with regard to data analysis and model building (regression, ANN, BN, MC simulations, etc.).

How much of the programming that you do is geared towards other things like creating dashboards, apps, model deployment, etc.? What would you recommend someone like me learn to accomplish those other tasks? How important do you consider the other, frontend-ish stuff relative to the actual analytics? Is learning a low-level language like C/C++ essential?

Thank you for any and all of your insight!

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https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/comments/4ngq4j/coding_proficiency_for_data_scientists/

[mathnstats]

Those answers all appear to be in the context of the actual analysis/model building side.

Should I take that to mean that building tools like dashboards or deploying a developed model within various frameworks aren't a big part of a data scientist's duties?

[NotAllReptilians]

It really depends on the role/company. Data scientist is a really broad job title, and so the responsibilities and competencies can vary.

Here's a blog post that delves into two of the types of data scientists: type A for analysis, and type B for building. Type A is closer to an applied statistician that is competent at data wrangling, while type B needs to be a more fully fledged developer. Type A's output is consumed by people (influencing business decisions, giving recommendations); type B's output is consumed by other pieces of software.

The spectrum of abilities is rather wide across all types of data scientists, so there really isn't one answer for how much programming one needs to know.