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by blazespin 3472 days ago
I think it would have been more interesting to constrain the query to must have PHD. There's probably a lot of grunt work that needs to be done in other languages that aren't really specific to machine learning. Eg, python is fantastic for data wrangling, but PHDs with R probably earn 2x what masters/bsc data wranglers do. But you probably need like 4x of the latter in terms of staff.

For the person who downvoted me, I wasn't saying R is better than Python. I was just saying that if you have just R, you're probably not doing data wrangling..

What this post is completely failing to capture is the exceedingly high value work in machine learning versus the typical work any skilled undergrad can do.
1 comments
aub3bhat 3472 days ago
Having spent last 4 months interviewing at several companies for ML roles, I can assure you that no one doing PhD in Computer Science (Machine Learning, Vision, Data Mining) uses R.

I also dont understand what you mean by "exceedingly high value work". For both production as well as research (ICML/NIPS/CVPR) the languages used are in most cases Python/C++/Lua.

Also Stats PhD (who I believe are the sole users of R) aren't typically hired into Machine Learning roles.

R is okay for wrangling tabular data, applying statical model for hypothesis testing and generating pretty charts for papers. But not suitable for state of art Audio, NLP, Vision or Reinforcement Learning.

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minimaxir 3472 days ago
> Also Stats PhD (who I believe are the sole users of R) aren't typically hired into Machine Learning roles.

FWIW, I used R for my undergrad, and still use R for personal projects afterwards. (with modern R, dplyr/ggplot2 are an order of magnitude easier to use, in my opinion, than the Python equivalents)

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jfpuget 3472 days ago
Lua isn't missed, read the article again. it is just that it just that Lua appears in exactly 0% of the job offers on indeed.com.
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frozenport 3472 days ago
Similiar experience. The only people using R were technology illiterate, mining existing datasets, mostly in life sciences.

This is very different than trying to recognize street signs.

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