[Career Talk] SDE or DS, How Can I Choose?

Authored by Tony Feng

Created on April 26th, 2022

Last Modified on April 28th, 2022

Intro

Recently, I am preparing for the application of 2023 summer intership in US. Since it might be my last industrial internship, this experience would influence my career path to a large extent and pave the way to my future career development. It’s time to conisder it comprehensively.

I would like to consider myself as a freshman in job hunting, because it’s my first time to seek employment in another country. In order to find a desirable job placement, I’ve gone through many related materials online. In this post, I’m gonna talk about Software Devlopment(SD) and Data Science(DS), two popular job directions most CS graduates will choose.

SD V.S. DS

Number of Job Opportunities

In general, companies offers more job positions for SD than DS evidently. The ratio is about 10 : 1 in average. SD is more friendly to new graduates than DS in that companies provides more SD placements for them. DS requires the candidates to earn a high education degree or have past working experience.

Job Categories

SD:

Software Development Engineer
Application Developer
Full-stack Web Developer
Frontend Developer
Backend Developer
…

DS:

Data Scientist
Applied Scientist
Statistician
Business Intelligence Engineer
Data/Product/Business Analyst
…

Cross Domain:

Machine Learning Engineer
Deep Learning Engineer
Data Engineer
…

Salary

The salary may vary depending on your experience, skills, training, certifications and your employer. In general, SD-related professionals are paid higher than DS-related professionals. Reasearch-oriented DS jobs have higher salaries than other kinds of DS jobs, because they are usually demanding and only open for PhDs.

Degree Requirements

SD: Bachlor’s degree or higher
DS: Master’s degree or higher. Many positions even require a Doctoral degree.

Hard Skills

SD:

Algorithm and Data Structure
Programming Paradigms
System Design
Testing

DS:

Statistics and Machien Learning
Data Manipulation and Modeling
Data Visualization
Experiemnts Design and Analysis
Business Case

Soft Skills

Common soft skills are indispensable for SD and DS in your long-term career development.

Besides, DS requires the candidates to have strong communications skills, data-driven decision making, product sense, etc.

Job Descriptions

Job responsibilities vary based on employers’ requirements and should be learned case by case.

SD

Full-Stack Engineer
- Front-End + Back-End
- UI + Server + Database Configuration
Mobile App Developer
- Android / IOS
- Memory + Computational Power
Graphics Engineer
- 2D and 3D Digital Platforms for Gaming and Video Production
- Math + CS
- Unity, OpenGL
Embedded Systems Engineer
- Control of machines
Software Development Engineer in Test(SDET)
- Dev + Automated Testing
DevOps Engineer
- Dev + Operations + Deployment
- Network or Sys Admin
- Source Control / Infrastructure Automation / Cloud

DS

Data Analysts
- Datasets -> Analysis -> Visulization(Reports / Resentations / …)
- Experiment (A/B testing) + Statistic + SQL / R / Python
- Product Interpretation + Actionable Insights + Communication
Data Scientist
- Data Manipulation + Statistical Modeling + Machine Learning
- Product Improvement
Applied Scientist / Research Scientist
- Independent Research + Literature Review
- Model Design + Implementation + Optimization
- Long-term Research
Quant Researcher
- Finance + Statistics + Coding
- Time Series

Cross Domain

Data Engineer
- Data Pipeline
- Data Infrastructure
Machine Learning Engineer
- Mathematics + Statistics + Probability
- Data Modeling and Evaluation
- ML System Design