Hello guys. It’s me, Hanif. Just a response to some of the comments here:

1. I think it’s absolutely fair to criticize this aspect of the analysis: the relative frequencies of the backgrounds of data scientists have been presented as suggesting the success rate from each field. Many of the comments in the post itself made a similar critique. As I’ve acknowledged in my responses to these comments, what we need are the relative frequencies of applicants from the different backgrounds, not just hires. However, one can justify the inference about the success rate of, say, Statisticians and Actuaries if one has the prior belief that the relative frequency of statistician applicants to DS positions should be higher than the observed relative frequency of statistician hires (<1%!) to DS positions. I don’t think this is unreasonable. 2. I make a similar argument with regards to MOOCs/bootcamps: my prior belief is that the relative frequency of bootcamp-only applicants should be higher than the observed relative frequency of bootcamp-only hires. Hence my statement about necessity vs. sufficiency. 3. It’s somewhat more complicated for applicants with both degrees and MOOCs/bootcamps. I haven’t done this, but what I can do is to look at the education distribution for hires with and without MOOCs. If the education distributions were similar, it would suggest that MOOCs have negligible impact. If, however, there is a higher relative frequency of say Bachelor’s degrees in the MOOC category, that would suggest that MOOCs/bootcamps have some value-added impact. 4. An ideal prospective study for the above would be to extract a sample of individuals from a precursor role, say, data analysts (hence naturally controlling for education). Note which of them have MOOCs or bootcamps, then follow them up in time to see how many end up as data scientists in each category. 5. I might actually change that profile picture. It’s 3 years old, in more innocent times. 6. As it happens I have landed a data scientist position in Singapore and will be starting in September.