Python is currently very popular as a beginner's programming language and has become the preferred language for introductory computer science courses. It is also a very versatile language, cropping up in many areas of expertise. Does this mean you can use it to switch career paths?

That's the idea explored in the following infographic from DataCamp which sets out to consider how Pythonistas might be able to switch from web developer to data scientist - or vice versa. 

Data Scientist continues to be a very popular career aspiration and it is easy to understand why. It ranks top of the 50 Best Jobs in America for 2017 and is amongst the top paying developer-related jobs worldwide according to the recent Stack Overflow survey.

While it might not be a career move that would encourage Data Scientist to want to master web development, the fact of the matter is that many developers thrive as jacks of many trades - and it always helps to be able to produce a website when one is required.

As the infographic tends to confirm there isn't very much common ground between the two specialties and I particularly like the quote from  Gael Varoquaux, a machine learning researcher for INRIA, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation and also a Core contributor to scientific computing in Python, which is taken from this video:

There's a culture gap: scientists come from Jupyter [a reference to what was formerly called the iPython notebook] and web devs maybe come from Saturn .... But the fact that we can work together is our strength.

click for high res version

Source DataCamp

Datacamp is an interactive platform to learn data science by doing. DataCamp's courses on R, Python and Data Science are built around a certain topic and combine video instruction with in-browser coding challenges so that you can learn by doing. 

You can start every data science course for free, whenever you want, wherever you want and if you want to go beyond the first chapter you can subscribe to all DataCamp content for $29 per month of $300 for a full year.

The salary data in the infographic suggests that this outlay might be worthwhile. It comes from online jobs site, Dice, and suggests that Data Scientists can expect to earn 15% more than Web Developers. It also shows that having R as a skill boosts pay expectations for those already embarked on a data science track. 

More Information

Switching From Web Dev to Data Science

DataCamp

Related Articles

Developer Pay Satisfaction According To Stack Overflow

Choosing The Best Beginner's Programming Language

What is a Data Scientist and How Do I Become One?

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info