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Discussion on: Data Scientists and Software Engineering

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ericschillerdev profile image
Unfrozen Caveman Dev

Exactly! I've got several years under my belt as a full stack web developer, and am currently moving more and more into data integration. Data scientists, business intelligence devs., analysts, etc. are all still doing software engineering. The ETL tools I'm using act a lot like code -- and are in fact extensible with code. The ideas are the same: make it readable, think about testing, automation, etc.

Everyone in my list above uses some combination of Python, R, Javascript, Java, C#, VBscript, etc. for modeling, mockups, analysis, etc. Even full on database engineering involves the same sorts of worries that programmers have in terms of input vs. output, how to best model data, usage, etc.

Finally, I'd even note that I used to work with actuaries and insurance underwriters. They set up massive Excel spreadsheets with dozens of macros and pivot tables to model and calculate various rating inputs for risk scenarios and charging for insurance premiums. If that's not software engineering, I don't know what is.