[st1x7]

I work as a data scientist and every statement in your post sounds incorrect to me. SQL is useful but it's far from the most important tool. It's certainly unlikely to land you a job. It definitely won't solve 97% of problems. You either have a very skewed perspective of what data science is or you spend a lot of time on linkedin/medium where bad advice like this is parroted a lot.

Think about this - there are a bunch of other software developers who know SQL very well. If your advice was true, then every backend developer would be able to immediately land a data science job and do great at it without having to learn a bunch of math, ML-specific stuff and a whole other tech stack.

[vector_spaces]

A surprisingly vast contingent of software developers do not know SQL, let alone know it very well. And as others have mentioned in this thread, data science looks differently at different companies.

For many, the math and "ML-specific stuff" ends up being a very small part of the process. For them, data quality and data cleaning take up the overwhelming majority of hours in a given project, and SQL chops will take you much farther in that kind of an environment.

Plus SQL is not going anywhere anytime soon. So worst case scenario, OP will learn a skill that's not likely to be dated in a few more tics of the hype cycle.

[disgruntledphd2]

I think you're both right.

I find it hard to imagine successful data scientists who don't know SQL.

OTOH, I find it hard to imagine (even though I've met some) successful data scientists who only know SQL.

I suppose it's necessary but not sufficient.

[te_chris]

I don’t think it’s that surprising. Most web dev is just doing mundane CRUD, and mostly through ORMs or other db abstractions. If you don’t practice something how can you be expected to be good at it?

[bvcvbuiy]

My job title is data scientist even though you may not think of me as a 'true' data scientist. Just to give you some context I work in an ecommerce startup. Depending on your industry and the size of your company things may be very different.

I maintain one machine learning model that is very core to our business but doing 'machine learning' is a very portion of my job.

> Think about this - there are a bunch of other software developers who know SQL very well. If your advice was true, then every backend developer would be able to immediately land a data science job and do great at it without having to learn a bunch of math, ML-specific stuff and a whole other tech stack.

In some companies Data scientists are very software development oriented but that is not the case of everywhere. Think about this : software developers who know SQL very well usually don't like cleaning data, they don't necessarily have good interpersonal skills required to solve business problems, they are not necessarily interested in solving business problems, and they may tend to think that more software is the solution to all problems.

[altdatathrow]

> there are a bunch of other software developers who know SQL very well. If your advice was true, then every backend developer would be able to immediately land a data science job

I fully disagree. Most backend developers don't know SQL beyond their ORM library or CRUD statements. The business intelligence world has utilized SQL to analyze data and make effective business decisions for 40+ years.

ML is 90% hype to check a box for investors, and the actual business problems could be solved by a semi-competent analyst armed with Excel or SQL, not a bunch of overpaid "scientists" who completed a few Andrew Ng courses.