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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 umafuckitt on Sunday October 19 2014, @07:44AM
MATLAB does win in a few ways, I think. The language is highly consistent and well managed, so new releases very rarely cause problems with in your code. The documentation is excellent and it's very easy to find functions and algorithms for the task at hand. This makes coding fast. All this definitely makes MATLAB more simple to use than, say, Python and numpy. I've not found MATLAB slow in my line of work (I work with large volumes of images). Typically I've found Python to be slower. I've never had a problem reading old MATLAB code whereas Perl, which you suggest is more readable than MATLAB, causes problems every time. I know plenty of very smart and competent people--data analysts--who use MATLAB to good effect. If you learn to use it properly, it's excellent. If you find it "a snowball of complexity" then you didn't learn to use it properly.