Husband looking into online schools for CS. Anything data science related. He loves math (and is freaking good at it) and teaches himself R for fun.

I put 0 thought into my own schools (terrible, I know, but not likely to change any time soon). Any suggestions for good online data Science programs, with a math minor potentially?

It's for his bachelor's.

I am from a third world country. Although I went to one of the better schools in my neighborhood, the education didnt work out very well for me (maybe because I wasn't the brightest kid in class). Nothing made much sense except math, but didnt do very well at that either since the number of equations I had to memorize increased every year and I hated memorizing. One day programming started to make sense and from then I got the best scores in the class for programming, somewhat decent scores in math and languages and barely made it for other subjects.

I just continued doing the only thing I was good at. I am really curious about physics, chemistry, biology and other subjects and I religiously watch youtube videos and read articles explaining related concepts. Maybe I would have followed a different career path if my science teachers made any sense. Or maybe I am too dumb for that.

Is programming for me? I am still not sure but I know this is something I like.

I don't know if I can be developer anymore. After I went to high school (one of the best in Poland) everything seems to collapse. My grades are poor. Especially on math and physics, but surprisingly everything Computer Science related is better than average. I also know how to code and I don't struggle with math used while programming. Heck, I even made my first game at the age of 10 in Visual Basic. I just love programming, computer science, etc, but after I went to high school I just don't know anymore...

One of my minions (erm, I mean, "a valued junior member of my team") asked to be assigned to tasks more "data science related".
Regardless of the very last-decade sounding request, I tried to explain to the Jr that there is more to "data science" than distilling custom llms and downloading pytorch models. There are several entire fields of study. And those are all sciences. In this context, science equals math.
But they said they were not scared of math.
I've seen them using their phones to calculate freaking tips. If you can't do 15% of a lunch bill in your head, hypothesis tests might be a bit more than challenging.
But, ok then. Here we go.

So I had them do some semi-supervisioned clustering. On a database as raw as dirt, but with barely 5Gb, few dimensions and regarding subjects with easily available experts.
Even better, we had hundreds of manually classified training and test cases.
The Jr came back a month later with some convoluted mess of convoluted networks; just the serialized weights of the poor thing were about as large as the database itself.
And when I tried it on some other manually classified test datasets... Freaking 41% error rate, for something that should be a slam dunk. Little better than a coin toss.
One month of their time wasted on an overfitted unusable mess.

I had to re-assign the task to someone else, more experienced, last friday. It was monday when they came up with an iterative KNN approach giving error rates for several values of K... some of them with less than 15% error on the test dataset.

WTF are schools teaching and calling "data science" nowadays?!?!?
I reeeeally need to watch those juniors more closely. Maybe ask for middle-sprint demonstrations. But those are soooo boring and waste so much time from people who know what they are doing...
Does anyone have a better idea to prevent this type of off-track deviation? Without being a total bore, that is.

And... should I start asking people "gotcha" data analysis questions before giving them free reign on this type of tasks? Or is it an asshole boss move? I would hate someone giving me a pop quizz before letting me work... But I got no other ideas.

We have people from all different types of backgrounds here on DevRant, and I feel like lots of us just kind of spontaneously discovered the dev world without really planning on it.

That makes me wonder, what did you major in during college, and is it related to what you're doing now? Did you major is Computer Science/Software Engineering/Web Development, or something completely different?

I double-majored in Algebraic Geometry and Astrophysics, and while my math background does come in handy as a developer, I'm very rarely applying what I actually specialized in to my dev work

I know it's not really related to development, but I got in a discussion on twitter and one dude tweeted "in science, 1 isn't 1"
And so I was like "mate what? science is highly dependent on math and in math, 1 is kinda always worth math"

And this this girl comes in and just says:
"it's not true that 1 is always 1 because there's binary code as well"

And was was like totally astonished, like, have you even studied something? 1b = 1d = 1x and it's always 1 in whatever base!
(she even says she's some sort of engineer in her bio)