Data Science Careers and Medical Specialties: An Amusing Parallel

I found it entertaining to draw a parallel between data science careers and medical specialties, to better convey the diversity of roles. The idea came to me from noticing that many people have difficulty perceiving the nuances (and it’s normal, it’s far from obvious).

▶ Data Science Tech Lead → Medical Director: supervision, strategic decision-making, team management, with a broad understanding of various domains.

▶ Data Scientist (Tabular Data) → Epidemiologist: Analysis of structured data sets, study of models, causes and effects...

▶ Data Scientist (NLP) → Speech Therapist: Understanding and interpretation of human language.

▶ Data Scientist (Computer Vision) → Radiologist: Understanding and interpretation of visual data.

▶ ML Engineer → Biomedical Engineer: Designing industrializable equipment/models.

▶ MLOps Engineer → Hospital Maintenance Engineer: maintenance, monitoring equipment, model lifecycle management.

Obviously these parallels are not 100% relevant. But the idea is that a specialist in one domain is not necessarily competent in all others, even if there is a common foundation of knowledge.

In general, you don't go to a cardiologist for dental problems.