As a data scientist at a large and fairly old company, the data reporting team is much larger and more respected. They build the reports that business stakeholders look at every day and make decisions from. Most data scientists would dream of having that much influence and "impact." But backwards thinking leads us to seeing more well-est…
As a data scientist at a large and fairly old company, the data reporting team is much larger and more respected. They build the reports that business stakeholders look at every day and make decisions from. Most data scientists would dream of having that much influence and "impact." But backwards thinking leads us to seeing more well-established data tools as less innovative and therefore less valuable.
The most common insight I get from data is that it isn't as good or useful as I thought. As one dumb example, I checked a couple columns for missing data and found none. Great! But then I dug one layer deeper and found that 30% of the values were the empty string "". It can be rough being the first person to really look at data that everyone believes is a goldmine.
The "more respected" part is what's most interesting to me. It feels like in Silicon Valley, people appreciate this kind of reliable reporting, but in the way they appreciate a good long snapper in football - there's never any glory in it, and doing a perfect job is seen as doing a passing job, and doing a passing job is seen as failure.
As a data scientist at a large and fairly old company, the data reporting team is much larger and more respected. They build the reports that business stakeholders look at every day and make decisions from. Most data scientists would dream of having that much influence and "impact." But backwards thinking leads us to seeing more well-established data tools as less innovative and therefore less valuable.
The most common insight I get from data is that it isn't as good or useful as I thought. As one dumb example, I checked a couple columns for missing data and found none. Great! But then I dug one layer deeper and found that 30% of the values were the empty string "". It can be rough being the first person to really look at data that everyone believes is a goldmine.
The "more respected" part is what's most interesting to me. It feels like in Silicon Valley, people appreciate this kind of reliable reporting, but in the way they appreciate a good long snapper in football - there's never any glory in it, and doing a perfect job is seen as doing a passing job, and doing a passing job is seen as failure.