Physics is a macho field. Not physically. Take a look at your average physics student. Physics is academically macho. Physics majors love to scoff at the other sciences. Biology’s just bullshit. Where’s the math?! Chemistry is all memorization, whereas Physics derives the quantum numbers from first principles. “Soft” science? That’s not science. Even within Physics, there’s a hierarchy of hardcoreness. Theoretical Physics is clearly at the top. Those who can’t cut it end up beco...| www.ethanrosenthal.com
You Can Not Measure What You Do Not Care To Manage When I started my first data scientist job in 2015, the team I joined had a recommendation system that would run every night to compute new recommendations for all users of our platform. This was the easiest way to handle the cold start problem. At the next company I worked at, we had a rule that every machine learning model must be setup to automatically retrain (“autoretrain”) on fresh data on a periodic basis.| www.ethanrosenthal.com
There is no shortage of stories about tech founders achieving face-melting wealth from startup success. Bless their hearts. On the other side are stories with unhappy endings of founders sacrificing everything for the sake of their startup. I hate those stories. This story lies smack-dab in the middle. There is zero money made and minimal money lost. This is a story of how I had an idea that I was excited about, pursued it for 6 months, and then decided to pull the plug and get a job.| www.ethanrosenthal.com
About 15 months ago, I left my full-time job as a machine learning team lead with the goal of doing independent / freelance data science consulting. Since then, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what that means and entails. I have not found too much information about this type of work, other than Greg Reda’s fantastic post. I hope this blog post answers some of those questions for anybody interested in becoming or hiring a data science consultant.| www.ethanrosenthal.com