Data Science and Finance

^Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll definitely look into it.

Tank

How do you compete against people who have PhDs from top schools and years of programming experience? I mean, yes you can get a job or whatever but how do you move up in the ladder when you already know that credentials speak and your boss is going to hire this random PhD guy or gal?

Answer, please.

Tank.

@StreetFighter, yes I kind of alluded to this in my post above as well. My thinking is that, we as finance professionals aren’t going to be competing against PhDs that are wizards at ML/Coding. At the end of the day, not everything can be solved through data science.

Folks at the top probably need a more high level understanding of concepts and incorporate them into their vision. From my understanding, Strategy > Technical, but you need some technical knowledge to determine the right strategy. My intention is to use the technical as supplementary to the a finance base. For example, no matter how good you are as a coder, you still need to know IFRS to be a CFO somewhere.

Then again, I could be mistaken, and us finance folks could be homeless in 10 years. \O.o/

Well, tech is growing mathy programmers are in demand. Realistically you probably won’t steal jobs from PhD’s but there’s enough to go around. For me, I’m more interested in funds that want a fundamental analyst who is data capable to interface with the rest of the platform, so I’m not trying to go work for Uber or whatever.

Thanks Sam.

So, I’m Canadian, so I probably can only do courses via Coursera. From my understanding, international tuition is an arm and a leg.

Are there any online courses you would recommend for Algorithms?

The Courses I mentioned above are all online and free. You don’t have to pay a dime for any of them.

MIT OCW 6006 is free and a good “Intro” to algorithms. It assumes you have an understanding of basic data structures and discrete/finite Mathematics.

I can assure that your firm would never ask you to write an algo lol.

By the way, data analyst job market is exploding and pretty much every firm out there is hiring one or two analysts and DS. I’ve been seeing a lot of MBAs going this DS route so definitely there is a demand. But as I said again, unless you are really really good you will hit a wall after your first job in DS because top guys are all PhD at my bank so that has been my experience. I wouldn’t venture out in model development types job because these are highly technical.

If you can leverage DS job into some project management type role or like product development where your communication skills play a bigger role then you have a future my friend. Don’t waste years of time on training and work which leads you no where. Have a strategy. If you have an amazing communication and people skills then don’t work in these highly technical jobs because they don’t care. Work somewhere where you can build long lasting relationships.

^totally agreed. I just don’t know what the right strategy is at the moment. Perhaps we could discuss offline for me to pick your brain on this.

They probably would never ask him to write an algo,but these “algos” are used to gauge people’s understanding of CS fundamentals. Since most entry-level DS jobs involve a good chunk of programming you should forget these jobs if you don’t know your basic algos.