[yvrev]

I'll preface this with I've not had a look at any Kaggle competition, but I always assumed Kaggle competitions was on par with programming competitions in terms of how the skills transfer professionally. A great programmer is not necessarily great at programming competitions after all.

Am I way off here?

[telchar]

No, there's way more to data science than competitions. But for someone who is already a data engineer more or less, I think it could be a good window into the complexity of modeling.

[disgruntledphd2]

Nope. Kaggle just covers the modelling part, which is normally much easier than figuring out how to solve business problems using data.