Has anyone moved from data science to web dev? What was your experience?

I have gone back and forth.

I'd say this. I've become convinced that the bottleneck in machine learning is the willingness of organizations to make training sets that are representative of their business problems.

If you are downloading data sets from Kaggle you are going to be "always a bridesmaid and never a bride."

So I am convinced that the royal road to automation is "break the task down into little bits, build something that people can control like a puppet to do the job, use the inputs to the puppet to train models that partially automate the task -- someday you need only 5-10% of the inputs that you started with"

Thinking about it that way I am very happy to be mastering (and I do mean mastering) user interfaces with React and similar tools.

I had a great opportunity in the past where I could have gotten management to take the initiative, formulate the problem correctly and build the right kind of training set but I didn't have the courage and I made the same mistake that almost everybody else makes to depend on generic algorithms and training sets -- something that we all knew would fail and it did.

I won't be fooled again.

I would love to learn more about this as well. I am working in data science and would like to switch to a backend web dev position. I work tangentially to back end devs and it seems like one of the biggest differences on the DS side is nobody knows anything about software development fundamentals. It's much harder to get good at these things when you need to learn them without knowledgeable team mates to challenge your ideas and not rubber stamp a PR.