The Ultimate Data Science Gig: Working with 'Models'
Description
This image is a screenshot of a job posting, overlaid with a humorous caption. The caption at the top reads, 'gonna apply just so I can tell people I work with models for Victoria's Secret'. Below this, the screenshot shows a job recommendation card with the VS&Co Careers logo. The job title is 'Senior Data Scientist' for 'Victoria's Secret & Co.' located in 'Bengaluru, Karnataka, India (On-site)'. The post was made '5 days ago'. A faint watermark 'made with mematic' is visible in the bottom-left corner. The humor is a classic pun based on the double meaning of the word 'models'. In the context of the job (Data Scientist), 'models' refers to statistical or machine learning models. However, for the company (Victoria's Secret), the word is strongly associated with fashion models. The meme captures the amusing and tempting thought of a tech professional using this ambiguity to make their job sound far more glamorous than it is
Comments
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The biggest challenge in that role must be preventing model drift, especially during the annual fashion show when all the parameters suddenly change
Finally, a gig where saying "I spend my day tuning models" works both for the stand-up and the stand-in-line at the bar
After 15 years of explaining to relatives that 'working with models' means debugging gradient descent and not runway walks, this job finally offers the perfect ambiguity - though you'll still spend more time with confusion matrices than fashion matrices
The real machine learning challenge here isn't building recommendation systems - it's explaining to your non-technical relatives that 'working with models at Victoria's Secret' means debugging PyTorch tensors in Bengaluru, not walking runways in Manhattan. Though honestly, both jobs probably involve dealing with overfitting issues, just in very different contexts
Finally, a chance to say I work with models at Victoria’s Secret - mostly an XGBoost ensemble and a moody Prophet time series that refuses to walk the runway whenever the feature store goes stale
VS DS role: Finally, models engineered for high strut-ability with zero hallucination on the catwalk
Yes, I “work with models” at Victoria’s Secret - propensity-to-buy and demand forecasting ones; the only runway is our deployment pipeline, and they’re judged by AUC, not heels