Major disappointment - Data Scientist Mumsnet Employee Review

1.0
1 Feb 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Flexible workplace who claim to accommodate parents.

Cons

This has been my most negative work experience so far, which luckily only lasted 5 weeks. I saw absolutely no opportunity for professional growth, as the Data Science team was reluctant to use Python and sklearn, and instead only used packages available in R. This then has an impact on the problem definition too: the questions that cannot be solved with R will not be asked. If you are looking to acquire the skills of building an automated data pipeline, apply cutting edge machine learning techniques with Python, sklearn and Tensor Flow, learn unit testing and hyperparameter tuning, then this is definitely not the right place in my opinion.

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Mumsnet Response
4y
I'm sorry you did not enjoy your experience working at Mumsnet. Whilst we have historically built a number of our products in R, we are not exclusively an R team and have members of the team who work in both R and Python. And we are always looking for novel solutions using all languages and technologies Most recently we have been using pandas, numpy, gensim, pylDAvis, spacy and ntlk for NLP work. One of our key requirements for team members is to collaborate and pair which requires constantly learning new technologies and frameworks and being comfortable with R and Python - something we are clear on during the interview process. We specialise in NLP techniques and have a learning culture with monthly study sessions and we encourage all members of the team to innovate and experiment with advanced machine learning techniques including word embeddings and other AI NLP approaches. We're proud of the proprietary data science products and pipelines that we have built thus far and we're excited about what the team might achieve in the future. That said, as we say in our Culture deck (https://www.slideshare.net/Mumsnet/mumsnet-our-culture-107447221), we're not the right fit for everyone. Best of luck with what you go on to work on next.

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3.0
16 May 2022
Anonymous employee
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Cons

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1.0
17 June 2025
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Pros

The owner loves to boast that parents will “never miss a sports day”

Cons

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