Is data science a freelancer-compatible field?

Question

Hi HN, I'm currently a (very mature) PhD student in CS and have about 20 years experience with Python web/database apps as well as a reasonable working knowledge of C/C++. I'm trying to diversify my work to include more that overlaps academia and scientists. I've done a very small bit before and really enjoyed it.My question is whether the world of data science, R, data pipelines, data analysis in Python, etc is something that makes sense for someone looking for well paid part time or short contract work. We all know that some subsets of software are basically all full-time jobs, but I don't know much about that area. thanks

spenczar5 · Accepted Answer

Yes, its fairly common in smaller startups that can&rsquo;t justify a full time data employee. But the work will likely be more like business analytics than data science: figure out how to measure retention and extract it from transaction logs, generate a weekly report that gets emailed to the CEO, that sort of thing. Not, like, PhD stuff which generally has a much slower payoff.