I, for one, am glad that IEEE is making an effort to get people excited about a formal education in data science. My education was a disjoint combination of CS and Statistics (my degree is formally in statistics), with no union between the two except what I made of it. In neither CS nor Statistics did my education formally cover problems associated with having too much data to fit in memory or store on one hard disk.
My biggest issue with the teams of statisticians I've worked with before is that they lack a basic understanding of computer science. My biggest complaint dealing with the software developers on analytics projects is they don't understand statistics. I heard a great quote for which I don't remember the source (I paraphrase here): "A data scientist is someone who knows more computer science than a statistician, and more statistics than a computer scientist." The nature of the analytics world right now suggests that this type of specialty is sorely needed in many places.
A more cynical definition would add "... and who is worse at statistics than any statistician and worse at software engineering than any software engineer." ;)
As a person who falls mostly into this camp I laughed at this since there is a grain of truth to it in my experience. There's also a certain scrappy pragmatism to being in this kind of role. Statisticians and software engineers tend to forget their technical ability is not innately valuable.
So, I'm considering grad school for either a masters in pure maths or statistics. Ultimately, I would love to teach math at a 2 yr college, but I also know that may not ever happen. Those jobs are just way competitive to get. A statistics degree would give me more versatility. I could get teaching jobs here in California's 2 yr CC system. But, I could also go out into the real world and work as a statistician.
I have a background in IT and programming. I did it for over 10 years. I was wondering, though, how much demand is there for data scientists? And, what kind of salaries could I expect?
My biggest issue with the teams of statisticians I've worked with before is that they lack a basic understanding of computer science. My biggest complaint dealing with the software developers on analytics projects is they don't understand statistics. I heard a great quote for which I don't remember the source (I paraphrase here): "A data scientist is someone who knows more computer science than a statistician, and more statistics than a computer scientist." The nature of the analytics world right now suggests that this type of specialty is sorely needed in many places.