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The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
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Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#22I work in the field of Data Science and one upsetting reality has started to sink into my mind over the last year. In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs. The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than the value of top line people. The easiest w…
Yeah that’s especially unfortunately true for data science and data engineering teams in companies where ml or data are not the core business but nice-to-have. They are usually the first ones from engineering being axed in times of lay offs.
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#23I work in the field of Data Science and one upsetting reality has started to sink into my mind over the last year. In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs. The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than the value of top line people. The easiest w…
This is one of the reasons why I think making the workplace Democratic is a good idea. The workers have a better idea of what is important than the management.
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#24I work in the field of Data Science and one upsetting reality has started to sink into my mind over the last year. In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs. The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than the value of top line people. The easiest w…
This is one of the reasons why I think making the workplace Democratic is a good idea. The workers have a better idea of what is important than the management.
Incorporate as a worker cooperative and not a corporation beholden to shareholders.
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#25Such a weird decision given the results they indicate. Was there any rational thought behind the layoffs beyond giving the metaverse more dollars?
It's possible to have teams that save millions of dollars a year and not be worth it to keep them. For the sake of argument, let's say a statistics team has 5 people. Cost of Employee at FB, including insurance, office space, 401K match, salary, bonuses = 250K/year (probably very conservative). Cost of Data and Software Infrastructure to support them (including people to respond to Infrastructure support tickets), le…
These employees are making a lot more than $250k just in base salary. Cost is probably closer to $1M each, all in. "A few million" in net cost savings isn't much for a team that probably costs $5M a year.
It would definitely be better to find another internal home (assuming the team is portable without its mother team that got cut), but sometimes these decisions are made quickly without a lot of granularity. They aren't necessarily going to find one sub-team that saves only ~1x their cost in net profit and figure out how to transplant them to another org.
He seems to have taken away the important lesson - if you're not primary you're in danger.
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#26I’m probably not as talented as the author, but I can’t relate to this feeling of giving up because some work won’t be used. I have been working for ten years post-PhD and every single product I’ve ever worked on has been canned, sometimes very circuitously via acquisitions. My work is trade secret so I’ve never filed a patent, written a publication, nor given a talk. I have zero outwardly observable accomplishments. My resume and LinkedIn rolodex are the only testaments that I’ve done anything at all.
And yet I don’t see myself retiring once I have enough money in a few years
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#27[deleted]
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#28> Most of my team has found other positions and I am hopeful that the rest will soon. Wow, I guess I would've figured that it would take people with this kind of background a while to find another gig (working on similar things) in the current environment. So maybe things aren't as bad as they seem? (yet, anyway) > But after >26 years of thinking about programming languages for corporations, and the last three years…
It's the way the cookie crumbles.
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#29I work in the field of Data Science and one upsetting reality has started to sink into my mind over the last year. In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs. The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than the value of top line people. The easiest w…
Cutting costs is always a marginal thing, because businesses tend to value growth. Oversimplification: If you have a 50% margin business, the value of one more dollar of revenue is $.50. If you cut costs and change the margin to 55%, then you've added only $.05 of revenue to that additional dollar.
Now, a sane person will look at the improvements to margin across the whole business and still want to make those improvements because in aggregate, they add up, BUT, you cannot improve margin forever as a strategy. Eventually, hard limits come up and the incremental gains shrink and shrink. At that point, growth dominates.
Most mature businesses need revenue growth much more than they need marginal internal gains, especially because as businesses get bigger, marginal gains tend to apply to more limited segments of the business. E.g. improving one product is marginal and applies to only the sales associated with that product.
I think the claim that data science is about moving the bottom line is right, but I think the other way of thinking about this is that Project/Consulting is probably a more relevant way for companies to buy these skills than Salary. Many companies can see the value in an incremental move in the bottom line, but most companies don't have a sufficiently large problem space to worry about paying a continuous cost to focus on this.
I've seen a lot of big companies say that they need these skills, but also believe they can't attract talent because they wouldn't be able to keep a data scientist busy.
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#30I work in the field of Data Science and one upsetting reality has started to sink into my mind over the last year. In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs. The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than the value of top line people. The easiest w…
I think this is an insightful assessment. Not everyone in a company can be top line. But I also think there's a lot more opportunity in using statistics/ml/data science in the top line than most companies practice.
But that would lead to accountability...