Kaggle Career Con 2018: Final Thoughts

Kaggle Career Con 2018 concluded today with two more livestream sessions, entitled "Finding Opportunities as a Data Science Consultant" and "Real Stories from a Panel of Career Switchers" now available as recordings on Kaggle's YouTube Channel. The final day's live sessions mostly detailed personal stories of the presenters along with advice they had to follow a similar path as a data science consultants or career switchers. Kaggle ran mixer events on Slack for participants to network with one another and employers in lieu of a third livestream event for the final day. Kaggle has also decided to leave the Career Con Slack channel open indefinitely, which could prove to be a useful resource for networking.


Final Thoughts


Kaggle's business model isn't completely transparent but recruiting seems to be an important component of its value proposition. Competitions with big prize pools might attract a lot of eyeballs, but it is unclear whether Kaggle receives compensation for hosting them and unknown how valuable winning solutions really are to the sponsors. Certainly Kaggle provides significant value to users who place in the money, but a small group of Kaggle super users dominate the top positions of competitions. On the other hand, Kaggle gives employers access to a large pool of users with data science skills. Kaggle Career Con was a push toward reinforcing Kaggle as a place for data scientists and employers to connect, while giving users advice on how to break into the field. Considering recruiting is likely one of Kaggle's biggest revenue sources, it would not be surprising to see something like the career con become a seasonal event or even a program run on a rolling schedule similar to modern online courses.