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Ask HN :How to become a low-end big data consultant?

9 points by noobplusplus ↗ HN
I want to earn some money for living.

Big Data is booming, and I want to strike the rod while it is hot. Just want to make some money, doing low end consultancy.

I have 2 years of professional python development experience, and freelancing with django/flask.

Big Data will fetch more $s per hour. So I want to shift to big data. Could someone please throw in pointers, as to where should I start, so that at the end of say 2 months, I start doing some low end freelancing on big data plucking some low hanging fruits.

I am not looking for shortcuts, but then I do not want to be researcher. My goals are simple, learn which shall be able to fetch me revenue.

Let me know what and how much, and I shall put in efforts.

It will be good of people to tell me the areas I should focus on, maybe start off with a problem itself, and learn whatever it takes to solve the problem, thus acquiring the skillsets, and using those to charge clients.

Also where would I find clients?

Please let me know, thanks.

22 comments

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morganwilde
I don't know if that's the right or wrong way of seeking out what to do - searching for "low hanging fruit" to pluck. By definition, they are easy to reach, thus by the time you become aware of such opportunities, usually, you're too late.
rdouble
With your current skills you'd get likely get stuck in a "data engineer" role which honestly kind of sucks. IMO you are better off buckling down to learn statistics and then some front end analysis tools like R and Tableau. Unfortunately there is not really a shortcut for learning stats.
noobplusplus
I am not looking for shortcuts, but then I do not want to be researcher. My goals are simple, learn which shall be able to fetch me revenue.

Let me know what and how much, and I shall put in efforts.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
tnorthcutt
Let me know what and how much

The parent commenter did let you know what.

rdouble
In my experience, even though data science is touted as a hot field, the reality is that it's kind of boring and doesn't pay more than other types of programming. It's hard to give specific advice because I think you're operating on incorrect assumptions.
noobplusplus
what according to you are the incorrect assumptions which I am operating on. My goal is to make somewhere around 60 - 70 USD/hr. and am willing to invest 2-3 months of learning.

And I already have 2 years of professional programming experience in Python.

rdouble
The incorrect assumption is that I don't think you'll necessarily make more money by being a data science consultant rather than a django/flask developer.

I don't know where you live but where I live you can make 60-70 USD/hr with the skills you already have. Like, make json API server for a mobile app with Flask, that pays anywhere from $50-150/hr in my experience. As someone else mentioned, what you get paid has more to do with where you live and who you work for.

uberalex
I would suggest the following topics (forgive me if this is a bit disorganised)

Languages:

    R, Python (pandas, numpy), C++ or Java, Matlab/Octave
Stats & Machine Learning Topics:

    Neural Nets,Decision Trees,SVM,

    Regression (Linear, Nonlinear, Logistic)

    Clustering (K-means, Fuzzy C-means, Mixture Modelling, etc.)

    Time-series Modelling/Prediction (AR, ARMA, ARIMA, Exponential Smoothing)

    Bayesian Techniques

    Statistical Model Development
System experience:

    Linux administration

    Big Data Libraries (hadoop at a minimum, Mahout, Hive,
Storm, Yarn as well)

    Data cleaning and large scale data management
rpedela
You already know Python which is great. It has become the dominant language among data scientists. Most of the best data science tools are in Python or R, and R can be easily integrated into Python.

The best way, in my opinion, to start is taking random, public data sets and converting them to a form that is useful using Python. For example, take a HTML page with a spreadsheet on it.

1. Extract the spreadsheet from the HTML page. 2. Convert that spreadsheet to a CSV format. 2a. Reorganize the columns (optional). 2b. Clean the data such as fix misspellings, reformat data such as an address to a standard format, etc. 3. Import the CSV file into a relational database. 4. The data set is now ready for use.

You could make 2a,b to be 3a,b instead if it is easier for you. The above is what I would consider "low-end". If you cannot do the above, then statistics, R, Tableau, Hadoop, etc will not help you much.

It turns out I am looking for people do this. You can check out my company (https://www.datalanche.com) and message me through the feedback form if you are interested. The job is to do the above for several public, healthcare data sets.

lifeisstillgood
That sounds almost embarrassingly low end.

I have heard plenty of big data, but according to you ETL still seems to be the biggest problem (closely followed by unsafe assumptions)

rpedela
I am curious, what are my "unsafe assumptions"? I would love more detailed feedback.

ETL is not the biggest problem, but it is very time consuming, tedious, and costly because the tools overall suck. That is why I started Datalanche although to be fair we so far only solve part of the problem (storage, query, sharing).

Anyway the OP wants to learn how to do big data and make money. Well even if you are doing the cool stuff such as analytics, you still need to know ETL basics. I offered to give some experience doing that.

lifeisstillgood
Not your unsafe assumptions but in stats almost every blind alley and wrong turn is an assumption that bit back. Assumed that the data we have is a representative sample of all purchasers etc etc

I have no real knowledge of the big data market so am happy to defer. I assume you are taking data sets covering g them same thing in hundreds or thousands of hospitals nationwide and outputting nicely mapped nationwide data?

Please do give as much info on the market as you can - always interested in hearing from on the ground "troops"

rpedela
I see. Yes I would agree that unsafe assumptions are a big problem when doing statistics regardless of data size, and probably one of the biggest if not the biggest.

My long-term hope is that people will start sharing data they have already formatted, cleaned, etc. This will save others time. So one of the goals of Datalanche is to make the sharing mechanic dead simple. Doesn't mean sharing will happen, but hopefully it makes it easier for those who do want to share.

Therefore we are populating our own website with public data starting with healthcare. I have personal experience with healthcare data analytics and have some sense of which data sets are useful.

rpedela
Just to give you a more concrete example.

The CDC has made available two datasets which are of de-identified medical records going back 20 years which are updated yearly. Unforunately it is extremely difficult to find the data. In fact, I went to the correct web page and missed it. One of my colleagues found it instead. The data is in a custom text format which needs a custom parser, and the format changes slightly every year. Then codes and abbreviations are used everywhere in the data set which need to be determined and converted. Then you have the usual misspellings, etc that are common in government data sets.

It is truly a pain to use these CDC data sets even though the data itself is great.

lifeisstillgood
Can you answer why it's so bad?

I can guess at a lot of answers but which particular strain of corporate pathology CDC suffers from

rpedela
I don't really know. I have an educated guess for the custom format though. They started collecting data before XML, JSON, etc were widely used and/or existed which explains the custom text format. Since their systems already handle their custom format, there is no real incentive to change it.
ishbits
I'm not sure if I'm correct or not, but I see 2 types of big data guys. First there are the guys who know the tools - perhaps this is the "data engineer" referenced by rdouble. This guy would know all the tools, how to map data in and out of say something like Cassandra or HBase?

Then there are the guys who can properly analyze the data and turn that into something that can save an enterprise money. This is probably where the big bucks come in.

At my weekly codeandcoffee gathering we are discussing some problems we think can be solved by big data analysis. The actual underlying technology is merely an implementation detail, the value will come from the results. Our goal is to save a target enterprise 1% a year, and given our target customer is a $40 billion company, that is a lot of money we can charge. We're just discussing what ifs at this point.

ig1
Where are you based ?

Generally where you're located has a much bigger impact on your earnings and potential clients than your skill-set.

pukka_my
Honestly, you're unlikely to get your hands on any data sets (or paychecks) that could really be considered 'big' without (1) an understanding of how to translate research questions into code & (2) the ability to tell your client why the results matter in any way. Why not just do freelance dev work?