[tom_b]

I wonder if you are less impacted by the lack of CS degree than by your "Software QA Engineer" label.

My own experience was that my initial position as a software performance engineer resulted in a perception that I was a "tester" without technical skills despite having multiple CS credentials and published code in practitioner-oriented sources.

Overcoming recruiter biases was such a struggle that I now routinely counsel students and early career programmers to carefully consider whether job role perceptions would negatively affect their future prospects. I also tell them, when financially viable, to not take on roles where hiring orgs cannot give them a day-to-day job description that directly matches their desired career path.

This advice seems quite challenging or maybe misguided for data science careers though. It seems like just getting an entry-level data science job might require a dedicated MS in either CS or stats, with a healthy set of projects in whichever of those two subjects you didn't spend grad school working on to prove yourself . . .

[bbarn]

You're probably on to something there. Sadly, the opposite of this is true too - it's incredibly hard to find competent QA Engineers (not testers) because they all realize very quickly they can make more money as rank and file software devs than QA-side specialists, even if their role in QA is leagues more complex.

[yttrium]

I had a similar experience. My first job out of college was for a Developer Role (building testing frameworks, maintaining and building browser extensions) but the job was titled 'QA Developer' so I had a hell of a time the first time I tried to find a new job. Never mind that I wrote thousands and thousands of lines of application code, lots of recruiters would deny me on the basis that my background didn't fit.

[thomasthomas]

Some companies are really dumb and only consider candidates with specific job titles on their resume. I've had recruiters from contract companies say "your experience is great but can we change your previous job title to X." Recruiter knows the client gets hung on job titles if its not exactly what they're looking for. In my experience i'll change previous job titles to fit the position i'm applying for, as most of my previous jobs I could've been titled 4-5 things.

[CryoLogic]

I've seen this happen. Most companies cannot hire competent recruiters. Often recruiters have no technical background, and are unfamiliar with all but the buzzwords.

This trend will probably continue until someone decides to up recruiter pay and hire engineering background candidates for recruiting roles (if possible).

[santaclaus]

Did you try dropping the exact title from your resume for a more general description of the role?

[yttrium]

Yes, but it was hard to entirely obfuscate the fact that I designed/coded testing frameworks. Part of my job was running and analyzing big batches of regression scripts, so it would have been disingenuous to pretend like it didn't happen.

[user5994461]

Replace by Software Engineer. Problem solved!