The One App You Need On Your Resume If You Want a Job At Google 205
HughPickens.com writes Jim Edwards writes at Business Insider that Google is so large and has such a massive need for talent that if you have the right skills, Google is really enthusiastic to hear from you — especially if you know how to use MatLab, a fourth-generation programming language that allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages, including C, C++, Java, Fortran and Python. The key is that data is produced visually or graphically, rather than in a spreadsheet. According to Jonathan Rosenberg , Google's former senior vice president for product management, being a master of statistics is probably your best way into Google right now and if you want to work at Google, make sure you can use MatLab. Big data — how to create it, manipulate it, and put it to good use — is one of those areas in which Google is really enthusiastic about. The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the successful business, regardless of its size. Rosenberg says that "my quote about statistics that I didn't use but often do is, 'Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it the samurai.'"
Statistics (Score:2)
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Your comment is definitely part of the 82% rule.
It says that 75.3% of statistics people quote are made up on the spot.
Shachar
Shash-job-vertisement (Score:5, Interesting)
Ugh, this reads like a job ad.
When I moved from Matlab to Python three years ago, I saw a massive speed increase of my methods. Also I no longer have to decide whether or not to shell out more cash for the statistics package, it's all there!
Looking back at my old Matlab code also makes me cringe a bit about the syntax of that language.
Re:Shash-job-vertisement (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah but a FORTRAN job where you wear 1940s clothes and program on a typewriter would be really cool.
And people would only interrupt you by rotary phone or speaking to your secretary.
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Looking back at my old Matlab code also makes me cringe a bit about the syntax of that language.
Then you haven't seen the "R" programming language yet.
Re:Shash-job-vertisement (Score:5, Interesting)
R syntax is a lot better. In Matlab, the dimensions of a 3D array are Y,X,Z. That's just one of the many papercuts that makes Matlab difficult and unintuitive to use. R makes a hell of a lot more sense to me.
That being said, R is also very slow. For one project, I used R and ended up having to use a supercomputer (I only needed a few hundred Opertons out of the 4096 available) to get all the work done in time. For a followup project, I rewrote it in C++ and reran all the same stuff in the same period on a Core 2 Duo. R is really that slow.
But then, R is an interpreted language, so that's not a surprise. And I was able to rewrite my code in C++ because we didn't need any special libraries; if we had, I wouldn't have had the expertise to reimplement it. R is really convenient to use for many things, and it's also faster than Matlab for everything I've tried in both. Matlab is a dog, and the Mac version crashes at the drop of a hat too. I can't believe people pay money for that crap, except that it's pushed on universities, so people get used to it.
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Re:Shash-job-vertisement (Score:5, Informative)
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, not as a statistician, but I do have an interest in statistics, subscribe to internal stats discussion mailing lists, and occasionally talk to Google statisticians.)
R syntax is a lot better. In Matlab, the dimensions of a 3D array are Y,X,Z. That's just one of the many papercuts that makes Matlab difficult and unintuitive to use. R makes a hell of a lot more sense to me.
From what I can see R is a lot more heavily used in Google than Matlab. The article's focus on Matlab is odd. Personally, I mostly use Mathematica. That's less because it's ideal (I haven't learned R so I can't compare, really) than because I already know it.
That said, Google definitely is interested in people who can extract knowledge from data, using whatever tools.
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Interesting. Do you know what book(s) on data-mining are most widely used/seen at Google?
Just curious.
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That being said, R is also very slow. For one project, I used R and ended up having to use a supercomputer (I only needed a few hundred Opertons out of the 4096 available) to get all the work done in time. For a followup project, I rewrote it in C++ and reran all the same stuff in the same period on a Core 2 Duo. R is really that slow.
How experienced are you with R? I ask because, while of course C++ will always be faster than R, such an enormous difference sounds like it might be due to doing things very suboptimally in R. It's really easy to have orders of magnitude difference in performance in R depending on how you do things. Of course that's possible in C++ too, but the difference is that most people who understand algorithms and architecture abstractly can probably write fairly fast code in C++ without too much familiarity with the
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Admittedly, the R code was probably horrible, but I inherited some of it, so I can't take all the blame. On the other hand, I'm really good at squeezing good performance out of C++.
This reminds me of the big hullabaloo Paul Graham made about how superior Lisp is because he was able to make more quickly adapt web back-ends for some website he'd done. I think attribution of this success to the language is misplaced -- his implenentation was more adaptable simply because he was a superior programmer, and Lis
Shash-job-vertisement (Score:2)
What bugged me about Matlab are the things that should be easy, but aren't. Subplots? Sure, easy enough. What about subplots with a different colour map for each plot? Nope. You can do it, but it's a third party extension. There are lots of little niggles like this, particularly around visualisation, that are annoying when you're paying thousands of dollars for a product. Particularly when they're all doable in Matplotlib without any effort...
We were told at the start of a physics degree, that they n
Obligatory Posting of Informative Blog (Score:2)
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Helps that my university has a
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Re:Shash-job-vertisement (Score:4, Insightful)
Ugh, this reads like a job ad.
When I moved from Matlab to Python three years ago, I saw a massive speed increase of my methods. Also I no longer have to decide whether or not to shell out more cash for the statistics package, it's all there!
Looking back at my old Matlab code also makes me cringe a bit about the syntax of that language.
Reads more like an ad for Matlab (with 2 links to Mathworks and 1 to the Wikipedia Matlab page in TFA) than a job ad. Though I suspect what actually happened was the reporter heard Jonathan Rosenberg mention Matlab (which the reporter hadn't heard of before) and got all excited over his "discovery" when anyone who's likely to get any kind of data analysis/statistics job for, well, anyone, already knows what Matlab is.
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If they were actually advertising a job opening it wouldn't be so bad. This is actually much more sinister and underhanded. They are issuing a demand that you go train yourself, at your own cost, in a specific skill, under the premise that it will get you a job, but there is nothing binding about their side of the "deal".
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The big speed increase for me was obtained using one minimisation search method which seemed to have been particularly well implemented in scipy. Since my project (https://bitbucket.org/pkwasniew/mcsas) uses an iterative procedure, this was very, very important.
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Mod parent up!
I haven't used it recently, but years ago I found the Matlab language and programming environment to be terrible - very primitive (which is why I haven't used it since). Sure, it has great libraries - it should considering the cost.
Mathematica is a wonderful programming environment, with equally powerful libraries (in many areas, far more powerful), and they have brought the cost of entry way down.
matlab is not new (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: matlab is not new (Score:3)
Re: matlab is not new (Score:3)
Re: matlab is not new (Score:2)
Re:matlab is not new (Score:4)
What is lost in the article is that a Mathematics PhD or at least information science as part of a CS or EE course, is probably the ACTUAL skill that google would like. You can pick up Matlab if you have been using other tools to do the function, but it's a shitload harder to pick up the math and relevant algorithms, research and hive knowledge.
Analogy (Score:5, Interesting)
Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai.
So, data is a weapon used against us?
And those that wield it are our new feudal lords?
At least we know how Googles Senior management really feels about things.
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I guess management is always retarded, even at google.
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"Visual representation" is a red flag, it always contains less information and detail than good old text (text in the eyes of a proficient reader mind you).
And, well, one property of graphical representation is that it is (more easily) accessible to idiots, aka, "The Management".
So there you have it.
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Encryption is the poisoned dart of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Ninja.
Re: Analogy (Score:3)
If analytics samurai draw a lot of false conclusions from bad data, will they commit ritual suicide?
MatLab is not really a good programming language (Score:5, Interesting)
MatLab is an old, crufty, feature-creeped script engine that I try to hold myself away from as much as I can. As a researcher and academic (got up to post-doc), Matlab is indeed ubiquitous in academia, but it's mostly due to entrenched positions. I see fewer and fewer people using Matlab these days, and that's a good thing.
Matlab is by all means not a fourth-generation programming language: it is procedural just like Fortran, which it supplanted in academia, but it does not have type-checking as C, it does not have OO support as C++, it does not do away with semicolons as end-of-line markers like Python; true, it has some advance features like OO and some functional programming, but (almost) nobody uses them, and most Matlab code is a horrible cruft made by self-not-so-well-taught academics. There is nothing in Matlab you cannot do better in Python with scipy, numpy, matplotlib and pandas. Or with declarative PLs like Modelica.
Matlab is also known for outrageous prices, leveraging on the fact their customer base are universities with big pockets and small administrative brains, and large corporations: they split their code base in many small chunks, and for each you need to pay more and more: as the saying goes, In Matlab you cannot do shit unless you buy a licence for the Toilet Paper toolbox.
Long story short: Matlab is the Perl of academia.
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Long story short: Matlab is the Perl of academia.
I disagree. I have been in a variety of academic or academic-associated roles in the past couple decades and I can tell you from my experience that
Perl is the Perl of academia. Matlab is mostly used for undergrad instruction; researchers roll their own solutions mostly in Perl, with occasional ventures into Python, Java, Ruby, or C++ as needed.
Although you are certainly correct on Matlab having outrageous prices. In my current position if I wanted to buy a license myself my government/academic disc
Re:MatLab is not really a good programming languag (Score:5, Insightful)
Agree. I use Python with open source packages like scipy, numpy, matplotlib and others, to achieve almost the same thing as Matlab.
Also the language (Python) is much cleaner.
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Matlab was used for undergrad lab courses (with the professors distributing old copies of the software gratis, not really mentioning whether it was legal or not!) and was... okay at it. Doing plots could g
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The presence or absence of semi-colons is not really an important factor in choosing a language. Yes, there's shitty MATLAB code out there by self-taught people. But if those people were self-taught in Python, then they'd be producing shitty Pyhton code instead. You can't judge a language by the code quality of its inexperienced users. You can write crap in anything.
I've work with both MATLAB and Python and I see MATLAB has having various advantages. It has excellent syntax for matrix manipulations--muc
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Moreover, it should be the algorithms and techniques which are and should be important. Most of us can cobble together a program with a GUI. I spent a lot of time studying things like Kalman Filters, and have concluded that there is no such thing as one size fits all or that it is possible or even desirable to parametrize additional features and forecast enhancements. There are a lot of formulations which l
Matlab is not an app (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Matlab is not an app (Score:4, Informative)
I used the word "app" long before it was corrupted by Angry Birds and the like.
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I think "app" came naturally to long-time Mac people, since there has long been an "Applications" folder which a lot of (most?) people just called the "Apps" folder. This lingo followed the jump to mobile on the iPhone and Windows people were introduced to the term for the first time. MATLAB has long been an "app" for Mac folks.
Re:Matlab is not an app (Score:5, Informative)
Or a gigantic application, like Photoshop or MATLAB, that sits in your "Applications" folder. Have you guys never heard of the term "killer app"??? Am I that old?
Python (Score:5, Interesting)
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I use Matlab and Python at work. They are good for different things. .
IMHO matlab has much more powerful graphics and debugging features. It is better set up for doing vector algebra problems. Python is better for some other forms of non-mathematical data operations. For most of my work Matlab is the better tool. On the windows platform it is much easier to install and manage
We run the SLAC accelerators using both for analysis and non-realtime feedback, but Matlab is generally the preferred tool by most of
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I can push a broom (Score:2)
Surely Google needs custodians, too. Or security. Or gardeners.
Granted, most of this can be contracted out. But if I were cleaning toilets I could still say, "I work at Google" and not "I work for Generic Contracting Services LLC."
Really? (Score:3)
Well color me shocked. Is the army looking for people who can accurately fire rifles and follow orders? What about the FAA and air traffic controllers?
Whoever wrote that and whichever (copy) editor let it through need to reevaluate their life choices.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they can and will drill both of those things into your head. What they are looking for is healthy people who are willing to die for whatever it is our military asks them to do.
Far too expensive (Score:5, Informative)
I work at a scientific institute and the license costs of Matlab quickly explode if you need something beyond basic functionality. Since we work on the public's money, we haven't bought into Matlab.
Almost by itself, all scientists and engineers standardized on Python and NumPy/SciPy/Matplotlib. There's a couple of people using Octave, the open source Matlab alternative, but that's very limited right now.
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Mathplotlib is great. If you have any experience with Gnuplot, you feel right at home.
Re:Far too expensive (Score:5, Informative)
I feel the need to plug the Pandas module for Python. It does a lot of R-like operations on huge datasets. It takes care of time-series alignment and has many other nicey-nices. Basically almost everything you think you need to invent to manipulate your dataset is probably already implemented in Pandas.
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Is there an open source alternative to Simulink?
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Not as far as I know, but I'm not an expert.
Who wants to work for Google nowadays? (Score:5, Interesting)
I know several really capable people that left Google, because of bureaucracy, corporate greed, incompetence, and general lack of vision. Google has become an ordinary large enterprise. And they do not even pay that well.
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The term for it is 'Publicly Traded' and it has to do with a certain kind of person who scurries into an organization once it becomes a certain sort of organization. Happens to every company, always.
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Entirely plausible.
Re:Who wants to work for Google nowadays? (Score:4, Insightful)
Its no longer "THE" place to work, for sure, but they do have all the nice perks and benefits and all the on-site stuff, interesting problems, and interesting culture. You also don't have to worry TOO much about them hiring a few retards that never get fired (at least not on the engineering side).
There's a lot of companies that provide the above, but not that many are well established with as many benefits (usually they'll be "profitable startups"). So while its not the "OMG OMG OMG OMG I NEED TO WORK AT GOOGLE" scenario anymore, its still on the list of places to consider.
Of course, then you have their "1 size fit all, basically random depending on who does the interview" interview process to go through, so it may not be worth the trouble, unless you're feeling lucky.
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I see what you did there. Well played, sir.
Re:Who wants to work for Google nowadays? (Score:5, Insightful)
You also don't have to worry TOO much about them hiring a few retards that never get fired (at least not on the engineering side).
This is the reason I like working for Google. I've worked with dozens, perhaps even low hundreds, of engineers over my four years with the company and in that time I only ran into one idiot.
I also have to disagree somewhat with the GP's characterization of Google. I spent 20 years working in ordinary large enterprises (as a consultant I saw many), and Google is dramatically different. Oh, there is some amount of bureaucracy creeping in. I think that's unavoidable in a company with tens of thousands of employees. But the company fights it really hard, and with a fair amount of success. It's not perfect, but it's the best place I've been, large or small.
Regarding pay, seems pretty good to me, particularly when you include bonuses and stock grants. I don't hear a lot of complaints from my colleagues, either.
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It will mainly depends where you come from... Google was unique a few years ago, but now a lot of companies are "cool", and Google has a lot more silly bullshit process than many others (ie: the promotion process, which has a lot in common with how big banks do it for engineers...and thats not a good thing).
For the pay, its because the tiers are shifted. An engineer lvl 2 (making up titles, read between the line) at Google is paid the same as a lvl 2 engineer elsewhere... but a lvl 2 at Google could be a l
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ie: the promotion process, which has a lot in common with how big banks do it for engineers...and thats not a good thing
I don't think so, and I spent 15 years working in and around large banks. I've never seen a self-nomination/promo-committee process anything like Google's. I'm not saying Google's is especially good (though I do think it's better than many alternatives I've seen, especially the ones which depend mostly on your manager's political clout and the ones that are all about checking all the right boxes), but I don't think it's comparable to anything in the financial industry or anywhere else outside of Silicon Val
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All companies have slightly different promotion processes, but its a small world, and everyone ends up working everywhere, knowing each other, and trading notes. Google's promotion process is nothing uncommon. You just didn't happen to work somewhere that had a similar one, thats all. I only worked for 3~ Big Bank (tm), 2 of which had a very very similar process, the other did not. Maybe my sample just isn't representative. There are thousands of companies out there after all :) About about a 1/4th of other
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Quite a few are downright geniuses that could move anywhere and ask for a fortune, yet they're T4-T6, often making a lot less money than me, even though I couldn't dream of doing their job.
So, why don't they move, if they're underpaid and there isn't anything different about Google?
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They have the nice perks and on-site stuff because they expect you to spend more than twelve hours per day there. They have daycare so you don't have to pick up your kids. They have a dentist that comes to the complex every so often so you don't leave for dental appointments, they have free food so you don't leave to pick up food and you don't go home to have dinner in the evening. An
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Well, I went through the interview process basically because a friend at Google asked me too and he had a dire need for somebody like me in his team. I can only call the whole interview process an utter fail on their side, they are not equipped to deal with people that have actual experience, insight and know what they are talking about. Fortunately, I did not get an offer. (At that time I was pissed, of course, but turns out they did not really hire anybody for the whole rest of that year.) On the other ha
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And they do not even pay that well.
This is not what recent hires have told me. Do you have any (suitably anonymized) examples in mind to back up your assertion?
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And they do not even pay that well.
This is not what recent hires have told me. Do you have any (suitably anonymized) examples in mind to back up your assertion?
I would also be interested in the numbers *you* seem to have. Survey's put them at ~120-140 + benefits, which is the same as the other large companies in the general area, and only 10k more than areas where the cost of housing is less by 30k (renting) or 60k (buying).
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The data points I have is that they offer about the same salaries outside the valley, so if you happen to be working in one of the remote offices you are making good money.
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Sorry, I cannot tell you my sources, so I will decline to give numbers as you could not verify or compare them meaningfully. That would be unfair.
Let me just say that I make about 10% less (scaled up to 100% employment), but get to chose my own work hours, have quite a bit of freedom how and where I want to work and get paid for every single minute of overtime (or can take vacation for it). I would say I have a better deal. And working with large infrastructure? I had my very own cluster (self-designed and
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Actually, it it you who does not have any clue what you are talking about. Conceptually, operationally and in general "feel", the difference between 1 server and 25 is far, far larger, than between 25 and 100'000. But it takes having had that experience to see that.
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It's amazing how quickly that happens. I work in an industry where we have a very cyclical business climate, so we have frequent layoffs. It usually keeps the engineering staff pretty top-notch. We haven't had a down cycle since the 2008 crash, so the cruft has certainly built up. I can only imagine what happens at a place like Google where the only turnover is people quitting!
Octave (Score:4, Interesting)
Octave is a hugely better option. I once used 128 instances of Octave on a cluster to run something that the computer center only had 5 matlab licenses for. Running matlab on a cluster is just stupid.
Oh, and if you care, Octave is as compatible with matlab as matlab is with itself. Every time you upgrade matlab you have to deal with broken things. Octave is not bug-for-bug compatible with matlab; it's better. Hugely better.
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Why is matlab on a cluster stupid? It has some parallel tools that work well for certain types of jobs.
Here is why you never chase what's "hot" in IT (Score:5, Insightful)
1) By the time you learn it, it won't be hot anymore.
2) It's all about experience. Don't take my word for it, look at the job ads. Learn something all you want, if you don't have five years experience in it, your knowledge is useless.
3) These articles about what's "hot" are just standard corporate propaganda. IT employers always want people chasing their tails, studying everything, just so they have a larger labor pool.
4) Don't get constantly distracted trying to learn what is supposedly "hot" at the moment, just learn anything useful, and be very good at it. Being very good at anything useful is far more valuable than a superficial knowledge of the latest fad.
5) These articles don't tell you anything more than they tell everybody else in the world. Learning whatever is not going to give you any competitive advantage.
All JMHO, of course.
Disclosure: I worked in IT for over 30 years. I have held several jobs, at several companies. I have been through the hiring process a lot.
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1) By the time you learn it, it won't be hot anymore.
2) It's all about experience. Don't take my word for it, look at the job ads. Learn something all you want, if you don't have five years experience in it, your knowledge is useless.
3) These articles about what's "hot" are just standard corporate propaganda. IT employers always want people chasing their tails, studying everything, just so they have a larger labor pool.
4) Don't get constantly distracted trying to learn what is supposedly "hot" at the moment, just learn anything useful, and be very good at it. Being very good at anything useful is far more valuable than a superficial knowledge of the latest fad.
5) These articles don't tell you anything more than they tell everybody else in the world. Learning whatever is not going to give you any competitive advantage.
All JMHO, of course.
Disclosure: I worked in IT for over 30 years. I have held several jobs, at several companies. I have been through the hiring process a lot.
Your statement is not relevant here because Matlab is not hot. scipy/numpy are hot, Matlab is old. I work as a research scientist in a top university doing heavy data-processing (however I personally maintain my own C++ wrapper of BLAS so I don't rely on other people's wrapper code).
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This is VERY true. (I'm another 30+ year I.T. veteran.)
The job market for I.T. works much like other markets .... If you have connections, it likely trumps everything else. (I'm pretty sure any decent sized company doing much with I.T. has employees who can detail scenarios for you where someone got a "cherry" job in I.T. because of who they knew.)
Next, you need lots of experience. If you're interviewed by someone with I.T. knowledge, they'll be able to discern how deep your knowledge goes. If you're int
or H-1b (Score:2, Insightful)
H-1b
Cheeky (Score:4, Insightful)
Publishing this just while we have a poll on favorite clickbaits, how appropriate!
Ugh (Score:4, Funny)
That's the douchiest way of saying "knowledge is power" that I have ever heard.
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However, your note is taken. This won't look good on your Google "behind-the-curtains" resume.
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I prefer the old Battletech/Mechwarrior line from the 90's, "Information is Ammunition".
Matlab and Java (Score:2)
A match made in hell!
Please god no. (Score:3, Informative)
I've used Matlab academically for about half a year now, and that most anybody (but for scientists and mathematicians operating solely on huge numeric matrices, maybe) uses it is rather shocking to me. The only good thing I can really say about Matlab is that it's made me a better programmer in _other_ languages. Sometimes when you're forced to do something so horribly wrong, the right way of doing it leaps out at you. It's like being forced to ride a unicycle, and suddenly realizing why the motorcycle was invented. Not to say that it doesn't have some very advanced features; it's not a simple beast by any means and -can- do some amazing stuff, but it seems to do them so.. weirdly, and often ridiculously slowly, that it's got that crufty feeling of legacy software with stuff just stapled on all over it.
I'm hopeful about http://www.julialang.org/ [julialang.org] the Julia language project and think it's worth at least keeping an eye on in the future.
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Matlab? Ugh! (Score:3)
I've worked in Matlab (doing DSP), but it's one butt ugly language. It's like FORTRAN with braces, and "global" only works sort of half. And its symbolic manipulation feels like an afterthought. Even Javascript is a better language. And for statistics, why not use R?
Pro tip: if you want to try your hand at Matlab: it's horribly expensive, but there are free clones available: Octave (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Octave) and Scilab (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scilab). I prefer the latter, but be sure to check the list of differences with Matlab.
Ironic (Score:2)
I became a consultant recently (applications of machine learning to big data). After 15+ years of working almost exclusively in Matlab, I switched to javascript/nodejs to get a 'real' programming language under my belt, a language relevant to the web. The fact was, unless I was in academia or a big company, I could not afford Matlab.
Which is interesting, as there is now a slight class barrier for entry to Google ie. you have to have gone to an institution that could afford the licencing.
And no ... Octave, S
Matlab spaghetti vs. software engineering (Score:2)
The Matlab language has evolved in a questionable way, software licenses are problematic and harming portability, but the biggest deal after having seen it used at various places, is that Matlab code becomes unmaintainable very fast (this is even more true with Simulink, but I won't digress).
Matlab is 100% good for one thing: accessing already existing Matlab code; which happens when dealing with research papers because students have been fed with free Matlab licenses since a young age.
Matlab is also good f
Samurai Were Actually Embarrassed of Their Swords (Score:3)
The quote 'Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it the samurai.' is a bad metaphor. I'll let the cracked authors explain why.
http://www.cracked.com/article... [cracked.com]
Samurai Were Actually Embarrassed of Their Swords
Oh, come on. This, at least, just has to be bullshit. A quick Google image search of "samurai" returns a gazillion results, 99 percent of which depict the famed warriors with sword in hand. There are drawings about them using swords. There are photos. Hell, pajamas, katanas, and weird hairstyles were their whole thing: Samurai damn well lived by the sword. What else did they have?
Actually ...
Yes, the samurai did have an ancient tradition centered around a weapon. However, it sure as shit wasn't the sword. In fact, ignore every movie and video game about samurai, because they only carried swords as awkward last resort weapons.
Kyuba no michi, "the way of the horse and bow," was there centuries before any semblance of Bushido. It's exactly what it says on the tin: Samurai were all about flinging arrows at peasants from horseback. It makes sense, really -- they were professional soldiers, and in that line of business you quickly learn that only idiots fight the enemy at stabbing distance. Bows were revered over swords to the extent that many Japanese nobles actually downplayed their swordsmanship. After all, pointing out how great your sword skills were was basically announcing that you're a terrible archer. And saying "I'm a terrible archer" was more or less like saying "I'm neither a man nor a warrior."
The introduction of firearms in the 16th century finally killed the samurai supremacy as mounted archers. As they left the battlefield and settled for a new life as bureaucrats and officials, their formerly reviled swords started taking on actual importance as elaborate status symbols. And because bows weren't really an option anymore, the sword became the go-to weapon of the honorable, sword-wielding, bushido following and completely fictional samurai they retroactively invented to feel better about their crummy desk jobs.
Maybe it's an unintentionally good metaphor. Big data is the new useless but symbolic catchphrase that you use to make your company look modern.
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You're right about that. However, Data scientist is a sexy job to the MBAs right now.
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I'm not that far from retirement but that job will disappear in the near future, the technology in IBM's Watson will "democratise" data analysis in the same way the PC has "democratised" programming. Experts will have a "conversation" with the computer in which man and machine will both "learn" something, Google style search engines will look as quaint as a "ready reckoner" book of maths tables. And yes, Watson relies heavily on statistics, it doesn't actually give you an "answer" it gives a range of answers with an associated probability. Sounds kinda flakey but the fact that it can beat the world's top trivia buffs in an open ended problem domain is old news.
When it won the Jeopardy championship a few years ago it needed 2 tons of air-conditioning alone and was an exclusive toy for IBM devs. Today it fits on a "pizza box" server and IBM have recently opened the API to the public.
Disclaimer: Worked for IBM in the 90's, not shilling, just my personal opinion that "cognitive computing" may turn out to be more significant to human history than anything else that's happened since WW2.
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Your notion of "Watson will do it all", while it probably has an element of truth in it, sounds like the old stories (before I was born) that in the near future programmers won't be needed anymore because computers will program themselves.
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While that works to have some developers like that, you at some point need developers that can look at the program as a whole and figure out that with a minor refactoring you can delete 40% of your code, because it is essentially redundant.
High end developers are not needed for a lot of things, but having a couple on staff can make the other developers a lot more productive.
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It's much more pleasurable to write or read python (or lisp (or smalltalk)) code, but you lose the kitchen sink. Here's a quick example: printf. Yes, it's ugly. And takes a little while to learn. But, it's very good at formatting text, and has all the options you need, want, or will ever want.
...unless you have something like the extremely powerful fmt [synthcode.com] at your disposal.
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You forgot to mention the even more impressive format [lispworks.com] function in Common Lisp that can print out roman numerals for you, not to mention its built-in iteration constructs, which you folks copied for your fmt function.
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OcTave (as TFA's author would probably write it) is a sufficiently good clone of Matlab. I write many of my scripts ins Octave on a Mac at home, for use at work on PCs.