[rifung]

Not sure if you're being serious but are you sure they would even care whether these kinds of candidates could program? I am skeptical they hired them to code; I imagine they mostly spend their time doing research and then have the SDEs implement things.

[jsweojtj]

It happens all the time, and it comes from a mix of things.

One way it happens is that you get a PhD in astrophysics with years of data analysis experience in for a data science job. Have a software engineer interview her and he might find that she doesn't know a number of basic computer sciences concepts [traversing a linked list, tail recursion, implement breadth-first-search]. His knowledge background says these basic ideas are fundamental, there are therefore serious questions about the technical ability of the interviewee.

[raverbashing]

This is a good example. At the same time this CS interviewer may not know what's the second central moment of a probability density function.

[eli_gottlieb]

Uhhh... the variance?

[kriro]

I have no idea how hiring in this field works but I'd expect a data scientist to have a pretty good (algorithmic) programming background in this day and age. You pretty much have to "play with the data" and get a good intuition for it when it comes to gigantic data sets and programming is how you accomplish that.

Or in other words...I'd be skeptical if a candidate hadn't learned programming on their own even if it wasn't required because it's pretty much impossible to get any practical experience otherwise.

[mhuffman]

I think often then have experience in programming, but in languages that don't map well to the "real world" of programming -- R, octave, matlab, etc. Those languages are also usually loaded with very helpful libraries to avoid having to do any nitty-gritty programming.