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Why Are Data Science Leaders Running for the Exit?

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Re: Why Are Data Science Leaders Running for the Exit?

#91

Post by RHSman2 »

apohn wrote: post #32
Maven911 wrote: post #2

Besides the demands of agile and corporate culture, is there other reasons why data science folks are leaving (if true)? For instance lack of cooperation, or not using the insights/recommendations?

Until recently I led a Data Science team (manager and IC) at a non-software Fortune 10. I, and everybody else on the team, left within a year of joining. The division where I was in hired me to grow both Data Science practice and the team. The company was enormous, so there were data science teams all across the company, all operating in silos. The biggest problem can be summarized like this: If you want to run your…

Surely you could have used data to have demonstrated how poor the ‘non robust’ model was and won the glory of the guy who argues and proves points(and is disliked for it?). My experience.

Re: Why Are Data Science Leaders Running for the Exit?

#92

Post by RHSman2 »

crescentfresh wrote: post #4
felideon wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our data scientist left because instead of data science, he ended up doing more ETL and data engineering support than what he originally had signed up for. A full-time data engineer should probably have been hired. I wonder if this leads to an analogous discussion as http://wiki.c2.com/?ArchitectsDontCode .

Not too familiar with the data-this, data-that space. What does a data engineer do? What does a data scientist do? Does either code?

One does math based hypothesis’s and the other moves data around and compute’s hypothesis’. Making a dashboard is not data science. At all.

Re: Why Are Data Science Leaders Running for the Exit?

#93

Post by RHSman2 »

PopsiclePete wrote: post #62

I've never seen a "data scientist" produce anything meaningful, at least at my company. They run some data through some Python framework and produce weird meaningless numbers that I'm supposed to be impressed by or to trust. No insight as to how that number came to be. "87.525%". Ok sweet. Could've come from /dev/urandom for all I know. At least 3 of them have left in the 2 years that I've been here. It seems like 90…

You sound like a decent person. Perhaps they left because of you?

Re: Why Are Data Science Leaders Running for the Exit?

#94

Post by dfmooreqqq »

eric_b wrote: post #36

Maybe these people want to leave because they realize they aren't adding value? I've worked in many Fortune 500's with "data science" or "big data" teams. These are well staffed, very expensive teams that have large budgets for pricey hardware (sometimes on-prem, sometimes in the cloud) I have never seen one of these teams produce insights or actionable intelligence valued anywhere near their cost. I mean not even cl…

I think this is a key point - too often, data "scientists" are brought in, given lots of tools, paid lots of money, and then told to just count things. And build dashboards that count things.

The data scientists that I have seen that are successful and bring the most value and seem to have the most satisfaction are those that spend time actually doing analysis and provide deep insights into the problems they are looking in to. The answers are the easy part - asking the right question is the difficult part.

Re: Why Are Data Science Leaders Running for the Exit?

#95

Post by [deleted] »

em500 wrote: post #54
autokad wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same here. i work great in teams, masters in computer science, do really well in kaggle competitions, I understand when to use the algorithms, how they work, etc. but in the very few ds interviews I had, I was tanked as soon I got asked questions like: whats the formula for a T test. I know what the test is, and when its not appropriate to apply it, but I don't memorize those kinds of formulas. the field is just too…

I'm sorry but a standard t-test is like the most basic thing in statistics after means and variances. It's not like they want you prove the CLT or something. To me it's more like a statistics fizz-buzz.

[deleted]

Re: Why Are Data Science Leaders Running for the Exit?

#96

Post by PopsiclePete »

RHSman2 wrote: post #93
PopsiclePete wrote: post #62

I've never seen a "data scientist" produce anything meaningful, at least at my company. They run some data through some Python framework and produce weird meaningless numbers that I'm supposed to be impressed by or to trust. No insight as to how that number came to be. "87.525%". Ok sweet. Could've come from /dev/urandom for all I know. At least 3 of them have left in the 2 years that I've been here. It seems like 90…

You sound like a decent person. Perhaps they left because of you?

In a company that's thousands of people large, across 5 continents, I have the power to make dozens of people, most of whom I've never communicated with outside of the occasional email, leave? I basically have superpowers.

Like I said, I'm sure "data science" as a science is great, and I'm sure there's plenty of "data scientists" that I would love to sit down and talk with and learn from. I just have never met any.

Re: Why Are Data Science Leaders Running for the Exit?

#97

Post by sjg007 »

taeric wrote: post #70
jbooth wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Academia doesn't care about interesting applications, they care about novel methods. "I made a huge difference for the business by being thoughtful about feature selection and then applying a bog-standard regression method" isn't appealing to the academic mindset.

To be fair, people are chasing a force multiplier here. Yeah, that is a buzzy term. :( No I don't like that. So, what I mean is that people are looking for something where they can apply one team's work and use it across many teams. The more the better. The idea is that you don't have to have many people being thoughtful producing methods, you just need many working hard applying them. If there is a better term for t…

I think an academic would be scientific in a data science role. You don't have to invent a new algorithm or tool.. just take the right approach.

Re: Why Are Data Science Leaders Running for the Exit?

#98

Post by apohn »

RHSman2 wrote: post #91
apohn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until recently I led a Data Science team (manager and IC) at a non-software Fortune 10. I, and everybody else on the team, left within a year of joining. The division where I was in hired me to grow both Data Science practice and the team. The company was enormous, so there were data science teams all across the company, all operating in silos. The biggest problem can be summarized like this: If you want to run your…

Surely you could have used data to have demonstrated how poor the ‘non robust’ model was and won the glory of the guy who argues and proves points(and is disliked for it?). My experience.

What I realized over the course of the year was that data was just a vehicle to justify gut feelings, opinions, and reports from "trusted" external vendors. It was more politics and about gaining visibility than it ever was about the validity of a model.

Re: Why Are Data Science Leaders Running for the Exit?

#99

Post by IgniteTheSun »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #16

A working knowledge of some basic stats, access to some decent tooling, a good working knowledge of what the organization is trying to accomplish and the ability to persuade and lead based on findings will likely move the revenue needle much more for most companies than a pure "data science" role. The trouble is of course we don't have a good name for that role, so it's all "data science".

We do have a good name for it: Six Sigma Green Belt.

Re: Why Are Data Science Leaders Running for the Exit?

#100

Post by IgniteTheSun »

apohn wrote: post #87
zebrafish wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a firm believer that data science should be pulled out of IT and put into the business. However, storage is so cheap that you should never NOT collect data if you can. It's better to dump it into a data warehouse and wait for somebody who can use it to come along than it is to never collect it. Then, and only then, should you look at your service levels and determine if there is a need for some sort of Hadoop or…

>I'm a firm believer that data science should be pulled out of IT and put into the business. I say this from personal experience. The major risk here is that Data Scientists will constantly get pulled in as resources to support business fires and high visibility projects that should be handled by other people. Otherwise what happens is this: "I know you are working on that Data Science project that is scoped for 4 we…

This may end up repeating the mistakes of a decade or two ago: after a business leader gets two requests rejected, they are very unlikely to go back with a third request - they will simply outsource every future request. Soon the IT departments were being downsized because they couldn't get business leaders to use them instead of going outside.
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