“Joel Test” for Data Science
blog.dominodatalab.com
“Joel Test” for Data Science
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: “Joel Test” for Data Science
#2"5. Is the team using our software?"
Re: “Joel Test” for Data Science
#3"5. Is the team using our software?"
Yeah, it feels too much like an advertisement of their product. All points mentioned are related to their product and I can think of some important aspects that were not mentioned, but are not addressed by their product.
Re: “Joel Test” for Data Science
#4A thinly veiled sales pitch for a "data science collaboration platform" is trotted out as some profound measure of how attractive a given company is to prospective applicants for data science positions.
I'm wary of the Joel Test and others like it for one very simple reason: the points are goals to strive towards, not some filter by which prospective employers should be judged. Especially in the case of a fledgeling field such as data science, wouldn't you want to be deeply involved in laying down the foundation for all that this screener list seems to take for granted?
Almost every point on this list is far from a solved problem. This is an exciting time for the industry, a happening time when we begin to establish some semblance of best practices by groping in the dark. What good are prospective data scientists who recoil from the challenge of working with engineers on tools that will enable future research?
Re: “Joel Test” for Data Science
#5"5. Is the team using our software?"
Bingo. I like the Domino guys but this is a transparent pitch for their particular platform. Last time they called, they weren't able to help with my use case. But my use cases are bizarre. Still, there are others like me. And they won't be well served by trying to shoehorn their work into Domino. Sometimes you end up having to build the platform yourself, because the existing ones can't do it.
Other times a pre-existing solution like Domino may help. I found out about sigOpt yesterday, for example, and balked at the price until I discovered they allow academics to use their platform for free. All of a sudden the hypercube searches I was dreading for tuning regularized tensor factorizations became a nonissue, and it costs me nothing.
If that becomes something that other people want to use (probably so, now that I think about it) I don't see why sigOpt shouldn't make a pile of money off it. And the Domino people have offered their platform free or cheap to our group in the past. It's not because of principles that I turned it down (my only real principle is "don't buy the cow if you get the milk for free"). It just didn't serve our group's needs. But the general principle of a shared, convenient store for data and analyses is a good one.
The other general principle that I tend to emphasize is that you should always see about a free trial beforehand. :-)
Re: “Joel Test” for Data Science
#6meh... for me number 1 should be: do they understand domain knowledge beats fancy analytics hands down most of the times or do they spend their time optimizing things nobody cares about?
Re: “Joel Test” for Data Science
#7"5. Is the team using our software?"
#5 does not require their product specifically.
The original Joel Test included CEO of the company that builds FogBugz asking "4. Do you have a bug database?" It was in fact a piece of content marketing.
Re: “Joel Test” for Data Science
#8"5. Is the team using our software?"
Bingo. I like the Domino guys but this is a transparent pitch for their particular platform. Last time they called, they weren't able to help with my use case. But my use cases are bizarre. Still, there are others like me. And they won't be well served by trying to shoehorn their work into Domino. Sometimes you end up having to build the platform yourself, because the existing ones can't do it. Other times a pre-exis…
Isn't the original Joel Test a transparent pitch for FogBugz?
Re: “Joel Test” for Data Science
#9The original Joel Test was a piece of content marketing by Joel Splosky, the CEO of the company that builds FogBugz among other tools for collaboration among software engineers. This appears to be the same. We should evaluate it its merits: Are these useful questions to ask in pursuit of a more productive and less frustrated data science team?
Re: “Joel Test” for Data Science
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bingo. I like the Domino guys but this is a transparent pitch for their particular platform. Last time they called, they weren't able to help with my use case. But my use cases are bizarre. Still, there are others like me. And they won't be well served by trying to shoehorn their work into Domino. Sometimes you end up having to build the platform yourself, because the existing ones can't do it. Other times a pre-exis…
Isn't the original Joel Test a transparent pitch for FogBugz?
Point taken. FogBugz was also, AFAIK, not a perfect solution for everyone (e.g. I don't recall it offering much for a shop where everyone uses screen or tmux as their window manager). But the underlying principles were handy anyways.