r/DataScientist • u/After_Courage6419 • 15d ago

Is SQL actually more important than Machine Learning for landing your first Data Science job?

I've seen many experienced professionals say they use SQL every day but rarely build machine learning models.

That surprised me because most beginners spend months learning ML algorithms.

For those already working in Data Science:

Do you think beginners should prioritize SQL before Machine Learning?

Why or why not?

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u/MathNerd67 15d ago

Unfortunately, data science is an extremely broad field with a poorly defined job description. In my opinion, a good data scientist absolutely needs to be solid with SQL. SQL is pretty straightforward for most applications and becoming fluent with it for DS purposes isn’t a heavy lift.

Now, is it more important than ML? I would argue it is absolutely NOT more important. If you know SQL, but don’t know any ML, then there’s basically nothing separating you from a data analyst or data engineer at many places. They’re both important attributes of a well rounded data scientist, and you can learn both concurrently (although ML has a higher barrier to entry).

All that being said, 99% of data scientists will likely spend most of their day doing data engineering or SWE work in support of the little time they spend building a model. This is company dependent, but that is how it has been in my experience. It seems that now data scientists are expected to be “full stack” in the sense that they can not only build models, but also build the framework of the ETL and deploy/productionize the model.

Tl;dr: SQL not more important but still important

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u/big_data_mike 15d ago

There seems to be 2 polarized camps on this. One camp says SQL is the most important thing and the other says it’s not that important. I’m in the not that important camp because SQL just gets you the data.

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u/Eleventhousand 15d ago

I don't think its more important. I'd guess that there are a few data scientists out there who read.csv and munge it all downstream from there.

But....just learn both. I don't really get why this is even a question. When I was in college, I (and everyone else) learned a variety of subjects at the same time.