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from the Mathamagician-of-Digitopolis dept.
Jim Edwards writes at Business Insider that Google is so large and has such a massive need for talent that if you have the right skills, Google is really enthusiastic to hear from you - especially if you know how to use MatLab, a fourth-generation programming language that allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages, including C, C++, Java, Fortran and Python. The key is that data is produced visually or graphically, rather than in a spreadsheet.
According to Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's former senior vice president for product management, being a master of statistics is probably your best way into Google right now and if you want to work at Google, make sure you can use MatLab. Big data — how to create it, manipulate it, and put it to good use — is one of those areas in which Google is really enthusiastic about. The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the successful business, regardless of its size. Rosenberg says that "My quote about statistics that I didn't use [last night] but often do is, 'Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it [are] the samurai.'"
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday October 19 2014, @04:24AM
So Python, C, and R is a suitable replacement?
(Perhaps GNU Octave and Gnuplot fits here somewhere too?)
I thought the point of Matlab is that it makes things possible and deal with the complexities for you. But never expected it to be fast..
(Score: 2) by physicsmajor on Sunday October 19 2014, @04:31AM
Indeed. Particularly with Google's Python roots, familiarity, and friendliness it is unbelievable to me that Google could possibly prefer MatLAB over the slick, easy to use, and scalable architecture available today via Python and the SciPy Stack. Hook into R for stats, use Cython to wrap or write lower level code as necessary, and... why does MatLAB exist, again, except for vendor inertia?
Google directly funds development of the SciPy Stack as well, through the GSoC project. They definitely know about this.
Was TFA paid for by MathWorks?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday October 19 2014, @05:03AM
Perhaps there a bad branch of Google going astray?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday October 19 2014, @11:27AM
I looked at the article (note, the list of homemade Halloween costumes is a much more interesting article) and its some former pointy haired boss.
So I'm not sure it means much.
A typical example. I wrote a SQL query to do something weird with two data sources and my bosses bosses great grandboss heard that some of his peasants use sq... sq something and databases. A quick google and obviously if you want to get hired here you need mssql or posgresql or nosql or something. Actually no, its a mysql install, but whatever.
Reading technical details into the idle mutterings of a non-technical guy.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday October 19 2014, @03:28PM
The one App you need on your résumé if you want a job at Google [businessinsider.com]
"Google's former svp/product management Jonathan Rosenberg" and the eduction is MBA + Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in economics.
I think the conclusion has to be that yes statistics and math skills is very useful. But Matlab isn't necessarily the tool for the job.
VLM, Any ideas on the path from peasant to money hoarding? ;-)
(Score: 1) by novak on Sunday October 19 2014, @04:34AM
Python, C or R could be a replacement. Any one of them is better than Matlab (I guess I should not speak for R because I have little familiarity with it.).
I once wrote a replacement for a matlab program in C in the time I had waiting for the matlab program to run. To be fair, the program was later optimized to run faster, but only by a factor of 10 or so.
The selling point of matlab is snazzy pictures baked in. To be fair, the libraries are a bit more versatile than gnuplot, there are some plots which are not easy to reproduce in gnuplot.
novak
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday October 19 2014, @05:05AM
The point of Matlab is being able to manipulate maths and getting the maths right. Before implementing or using it elsewhere?
(the speed is not point)
How is the GNU Octave libraries compared to Matlab?
(Score: 1) by novak on Sunday October 19 2014, @05:24AM
Matlab's math libraries are not better than any other math libraries, especially not without paying for several toolkits.
Also it's worth pointing out that speed is the point of anything being used to analyze non-trivial data sets. Do a power weighted reverse interpolation onto an arbitrary mesh for a real data set (well, the software I wrote was working on data sets in the 10 GB size range (dp), being mapped onto 100 MB meshes (dp)). If speed doesn't matter yet it soon will.
Ooh, here's a fun bit of info: you'll take a major speed hit in matlab on that interpolation if you use any power besides 2.
Math is not a side bar to 'real' programming, some of the highest performance software is math software, and some of the hardest problems are math problems. Navier-Stokes was the big one in the field I worked. If you could do 100 times as many computations per second as 10 years back, customers expect 100 times as many computations.
I don't really know about Octave, I tried to use it once or twice and was not really impressed. I recall one matlab program seemed to not run but it turned out it was just running really slow. That was probably five years back though, it may have improved.
novak
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday October 19 2014, @05:33AM
I was thinking of stuff like FFT or image recognition etc. Small dataset but complicated math.
(Score: 1) by novak on Sunday October 19 2014, @05:46AM
That's probably the closest you can get to something matlab works well for. If you buy the FFT toolkit or image processing toolkit instead of using a free library in another language.
novak