1. Club Weekly News OCT 26 2022
Part 1 Check Out the latest Tech News!
Meta Will Freeze Most Hiring, Zuckerberg Tells Employees：
The company’s chief executive had signaled for several months that he wanted to rein in costs as he shifts attention toward the metaverse. Zuckerberg told his employees that the company would freeze hiring and reduce budgets across most teams at Meta, leading to layoffs in parts of the company that have previously seen unchecked growth. Meta has shown signs of slowing financially for most of the year as it makes an aggressive move toward offering products for the nascent metaverse — an area that Mr. Zuckerberg believes is the future of his company but is still largely unproven.
Google to Shut Down Stadia Video Game Streaming Service:
Google said it would shutter the video game streaming service Stadia, its answer to Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation video game consoles, in another sign of Google’s drive to be leaner amid fears of an economic slowdown. Stadia, which has streamed games over the internet rather than requiring expensive consoles, debuted nearly three years ago, promising to revolutionize how people play video games. But it failed to catch on with enough gamers.
The Crypto World Is on Edge After a String of Hacks：
More than $2 billion in digital currency has been stolen in hacks this year, shaking faith in the experimental field of decentralized finance, known as DeFi. Many of the thefts have stemmed from flaws in the computer programs — known as “smart contracts” — that power DeFi. The programs are often built hastily. And because smart contracts use open-source code, which provides a publicly viewable map of the software, hackers have been able to orchestrate attacks on the digital infrastructure itself, rather than simply infiltrating someone’s account.
A New Refrain From Artists: We ‘Almost Gave Up on Instagram’：
Instagram has in recent years increasingly shifted toward video. It has introduced Reels, short videos meant to compete with the video-sharing app TikTok, and it has launched features to encourage people to make videos together. For artists who make a living through Instagram, the platform’s move toward video is more of an existential threat. Many of these artists are photographers, illustrators or graphic novelists whose work doesn’t easily translate to video. More and more, they are finding that audiences on Instagram aren’t seeing their posts, their growth on the platform is stagnating and their reach is shrinking.
Part 2 Data engineer, data scientist, data analyst, business analyst? What’s the difference?
Data engineers provide relatively infrastructural support to ensure the availability of data for data scientists and data analysts’ later use.
They typically have solid knowledge in technology or IT. Data engineers typically have a background in engineering, computer science or other related IT fields. (A related education background is better than related certificates.)
Data scientists derive undiscovered potential opportunities from data sets in order to solve business related problems.
To deal with a large amount of structured and unstructured data, they are expected to back up with knowledge in mathematics, statistics, programming, or computer science.
Data analysts would take the findings from data scientists and turn into actionable insights. Another difference lies in that data analysts are more focused on current situation of the business, while data scientists also build predictive models to look into the future.
Business analysts are more about shaping better business decisions with data and dealing with stakeholders.
Business analysts concentrate more on data visualization, where tableau, Power Bi and tools as such are helpful. Also, their duties include communicating with non-technical audience, which means they must analytically understand how to convert the data to business questions.
Just a reminder: what we mentioned above are general differences among the four titles, but actually the concentration of the same title might vary with specific industries or companies.
Here we have our club advisor, professor Day Yi, to share his typical day at Amazon and views in the role of data! Hopefully you can gain some insights!
