[it_does_follow]

You've never had to any kind of factor analysis in your work or done any searching for latent variables that map to customer/stakeholder question? Given the number of people I've worked with that are interested in modeling "engagement", I find this hard to believe.

PCA is an incredibly valuable tool that I've used in most jobs I've had. It's just a terrible idea as a default part of a feature engineering pipeline (which is what the author is talking about in terms of "feature selection"), for reasons outline in this article.

I suggest you don't be quite so quick to dismiss important concepts in this area, and before criticizing this post, at least read through it (I noticed your comment about misunderstand what the author is discussing by "feature selection" is the top comment here).

[jstx1]

> You've never had to

Nope, never. I'm not dismissing PCA altogether; I'm sharing my experience and pointing out that some topics come up much more often in interviews than on the job.

[nerdponx]

My experience is the opposite of yours. It has never come up in a job interview but I have used it for real work several times.