

Airbnb Tech Talk: Josh Wills of Cloudera, on Growing Data Scientists - zephyrnh
https://www.airbnb.com/meetups/4xphza94s-tech-talk-josh-wills

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gaius
1) Get an ordinary Business Analyst that corporations have had for decades 2)
dress him or her as a hipster 3) Data Scientist!

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bernatfp
I find your comment rather funny, but you are forgetting some very relevant
skills a DS is expected to have like NoSQL knowledge, MapReduce (Hadoop), some
decent language to interact with... I don't think it's that easy to find
somebody with these skills.

BTW thanks Airbnb for holding these talks!

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gaius
Right, but BAs have been doing SPSS, SAS, Mathematica, MATLAB, R etc, etc for
decades. Any BA worth his or her salt could pick up these new things without
breaking a sweat - they are not rocket science, and the value of a BA is in
their knowledge of statistics and industry domain knowledge.

A DS is a BA without sufficient industry experience to know there is already a
job doing what they do...

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yummyfajitas
I don't really agree with this. A "Data Scientist" (as the term is "properly"
used [1]) generally needs to be a very good computer scientist in addition to
understanding the data.

Ordinary data analysis generally lives in a world where the computer is fast
enough, and you need domain knowledge + basic stats. The term "Data
Scientist", when properly used, deals with cases where domain knowledge +
basic stats isn't sufficient, and computer science knowledge is also required.

[1] Many people who advertise for a "data scientist" really just need a BA or
a DBA. I recently turned down a job as a "data scientist" after telling them
that Hadoop is massive overkill. `SELECT SUM(x) FROM table WHERE condition`
took about 4 seconds to run. Admittedly, the ruby script they were using to do
it row by row was a lot slower, particularly since they were loading the
entire row rather than just field `x`.

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brandonb
Not only is Josh is one of the smartest guys I know, he's a damn nice guy too.
Highly recommended!

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andre3k1
Free!

