Given the success of well run hacker schools like Dev Bootcamp and Flatiron Schools, I am surprised no one has yet tried to apply that model to training data scientists. It seems like a sector similarly deprived of properly trained talent and also with a similar initial learning curve to develop the basic skill set.
From what I understand from skimming the site, Dev Bootcamp teaches people RoR and a few other web technologies in 9 weeks. All that tells me is that you know one programming language, it doesn't tell me whether you are a programmer, whether you understand concurrency problems, race conditions, algorithms etc. Sure, this is alright for a lot of programming positions because there are a lot of positions out there that don't need those.
The problem with data science is that it is incredibly hard to teach anyone Linear Algebra, Probability, statistics in 9 weeks. Sure, I can hand wave all that and then teach you a bunch of machine learning algorithms. All you get at the end of it is people who claim they understand it intuitively and don't need the math. Except that mathematical intuition builds up accumulatively.
It is easy to see this in interviews; you can see folks who are really good at drawing pretty pictures to explain say PCA. They have no clue when not to use such a thing. It makes no intuitive sense to them why PCA breaks down when there are outliers. If they can't draw a picture of it, it is difficult for them to comprehend.
thanks for the detailed response. I know very little about the actual application of data science, so it nice to hear the thoughts on the feasibility of this from someone who does. Either way, someone seems to think they can teach it in a bootcamp format, so I am curious to see how they manage.
There's also http://insightdatascience.com/ . This is a little bit different; it's a program aimed at training postdocs in various fields to be data scientists.
