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I write programs, but I am not a programmer.
I am not a programmer. (Professional Software Developer, or Software Engineer).
Sure, I studied programming in school. That was a few days ago at this point.
I have taught myself, or taken online courses for R, Python, and other languages of the day while I have probably written more code in SQL than any other language.
I do not code in Java, or .Net
I strongly suspect I will never code in Java, or Net.
For many things, I use Databricks notebooks (Scala, Python, R, and SQL).
I am a data scientist. We start with Data. The way I explain myself to many people, I take the data that is generated by an application, and answer questions that the originally programmers, business analysts, users, and stakeholders probably never thought of.
This does require writing some code. I have to pull data from the source system (original application). Transform, or Munge the data to fit into an algorithm I am using (Time-series, Markov chains, Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, Regression, etc.) Then load it into either a series of files in my data lake, or even some tables I create for repeatable analysis.
Much of my time is spent working on understanding the meaning of the data, and how the application of this understanding will impact our business.
Writing code may be an important aspect of ensuring the analysis is repeatable as part of creating a useful data product. However, if you are focused too much on the code itself, versus how does the code help you transform your data into information and insight.
Isn't the purpose of our data products to gain insight from our data?
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