Introduction
Are you a Data Scientist? How much will you be paid later in life? Or how much should you be expecting right now? Well in the article “Data Scientist Job Salaries Analysis” by Nikhil Purao he tells you exactly that via his in-depth analysis of the topic(the article can be found here).
Summary of Article
In the article, Purao breaks down salaries into 3 broad categories: experience level, company size, and employment types. These categories are further divided into subcategories as follows:
| Experience level | Company size | Employment types |
| 1. Entry level 2. Mid-level 3. Senior level 4. Executive level | 1. Small 2. Medium 3. Large | 1. Full time 2. Part-time 3. Contract basis 4. Freelancer |
The article takes you through the entire process that Purao took to arrive at his conclusions. It shows you each and every step that was taken, with an explanation for some of the more complicated ones, first to explore and then manipulate the data to arrive at the insights presented in the article. Some of the significant insights were:
- Compared to other seniority levels the executive level had much more variation in its pay scale
- Contract-based jobs earn the most however the variation in their pay scale is also very high
- Most data science jobs are in the USA, but Japan, Spain, Canada, The United Kingdom, France, India, and Greece also have some high-paying data science jobs
- Data scientists earn the most in USD, then the Swiss Franc, followed by the Singapore dollar.
My Take
This article was written very well and was very easy to understand. It was also really fascinating for me. Since I want to go into this field it helped me understand the pay spectrum and the major factors that influence it. It was also really fun to get these insights from the data with the visualization provided in the article as they not only helped with my understanding of the content but made the article a much more enjoyable and interesting one to read. Upon reading I was really shocked at how contract-based jobs earn the most over any other employment type. But after further reconsideration and giving it some thought as to why this might be the case I came up with a hypothesis: contractors get paid the most out of any other employment type because when you hire a contractor companies aren’t required to give them the same benefits and perks as their other employees allowing them to save money on that front, but the contractor might as for more pay to compensate for this loss of benefits.
Conclusion
All in all, this article was really fascinating. It was written very well and in an easy-to-understand and follow format by using visuals the author made for a manageable and fun-to-read article because the visuals broke up the text into smaller chunks. I also got some very useful insights from it for my career later down the line. I recommend you take the time to read it(the article can be found here)!