What does a day in the life of a data scientist look like? - kmalhi
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ktpsns
From my experience, one works a lot explorative in REPL terminals (like
IPython, R Studio, MATLAB, etc, depending on your field). This is the place
where to create novel graphs and plots and to discuss them with colleagues in
order to make conclusions. Discussion also takes place in regular meetings,
completely depending on the kind of workplace, of course.

Organizational tasks like preparing a work setups, sorting, downloading or
uploading data also takes a significant time. It is always a tradeoff of
automating tasks (writing scripts to do the painful work) or doing it manually
by hand.

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kmalhi
In what scenarios do you have to manually download and upload data. There are
ingestion tools out there. It seems like automating tasks is painful. What
kind of tasks are those? I’m guessing all of this takes a lot of your time
away from actual analysis

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ktpsns
Yup, there are tools "for almost everything", but they must be flexible
enough, then compatible to the machines used, and learned to use. For
instance, in science, "grid computing" is popular to automate away the
orchestration of files and codes between machines. But it's not always
available and sometimes not applicable.

I assume every workplace has an overhead part which keeps one from doing the
actual work.

~~~
kmalhi
Do you have to do the whole infrastructure setup yourself or do you get help
from your engineering team?

