

What Is a Data Scientist? - sweetdreamerit
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danwoods/2011/11/27/linkedins-monica-rogati-on-what-is-a-data-scientist/

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achompas
A data scientist is two things:

1\. A business analyst who has traded Excel for a Unix command prompt and a
scripting language, because (a) there's more data now than before, and (b)
data is harder to clean because of (a).

2\. A mythical unicorn creature that has spawned a conference, multiple books,
and thousands of page views for O'Reilly, Business Insider, Forbes, etc.
They're all "data-driven organizations" that double their page views any time
the word "data" is whispered. As a result, they parse shitty articles into
four ad-driven pages and publish books on "Data Mining Your Cat" or "Machine
Learning Models for Organic Dietary Schedules."

Here are some better questions that will save you some time:

1\. What is this article? Buzzword soup mixed with terrible journalism.

2\. How do I become a data scientist? Don't--instead, build a good foundation
in statistics and keep coding. You'll be happier and wealthier for it.

EDIT: removed a bunch of snark. Not all of it, obviously. ;)

EDIT 2: added some snark back. I really hate this "data scientist" meme.

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_dps
I second your snark, and also find "data scientist" to be analogous to "food
cooker", but I've also come to realize that there _is_ a need for branding
whatever-it-is as separate from "business analyst" because otherwise
expectations from non-technical customers get very confused.

I interact with many buyers of buzzword-laden "big data" (snark on that one
reserved for another day) and "data science" offerings. If you tell them
you're a business analyst they will make many hidden assumptions based on the
overall population of people using that title. Among those assumptions:

1\. The business analyst will probably know SQL, but if we want to do
something like analyze our query logs it will cost us developer time.

2\. The business analyst will have domain knowledge about financials and
_maybe_ user engagement, but probably not anything else. The business analyst
will not be able to tell us, for example, the characteristics of our 99-th
percentile slowest page loads.

3\. The business analyst is not hip and modern, because everything is about
the "big data" these days.

Realistically, the language of modern business data applications requires a
name for someone who is not just a business analyst as we knew them from the
90s. The people offering the services need a name to differentiate themselves
when applying for jobs, and the customers need a way to indicate that they are
not looking for "just a business analyst." We seem to have ended up with a
rather foolish bit of terminology to serve this need, which is not surprising
given that it emerged to facilitate an asymmetric market of the clueless
looking for the knowledgeable.

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plam
what's with all the resentments? A few years back, titles like UX designer, UI
designer, front-end developer, and back-end developer were non-existent too.
Aren't they all just designers or programmers?

As a maturing technology tree branches out, more and more specialists will be
born.

~~~
achompas
Totally agreed. Those titles serve to differentiate between responsibilities
given to designers and programmers.

So how does a data scientist's responsibilities differ from those of a
business analyst?

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plam
From a 30k feet point of view, the difference is that a business analyst or
data miner focus on answering questions with data; whereas, a data scientist
focus on asking questions with data.

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achompas
What does "asking questions with data" mean?

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plam
Quoting from the article,

"On one side, I’ve been working on building products, like the recommender
system, Talent Match, modeling and finding ways to empower users to use
LinkedIn through their products. Groups You May Like was another product I
started.

The other side is finding interesting stories in the data. It’s exciting to be
able to tell stories collected from the careers of 120 million professionals,
and trying to learn what that data can tell us about the world at large. That
has given us stories such as, “top times of year to be promoted,” “overused
buzzwords” and “top CEO names.” Industries are ebbing and flowing, and there
are a lot of insights about the world at large from people’s profiles when
they are combined and aggregated."

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kevinalexbrown
When I see

 _It is a new and emerging field, and it has to do with adapting to demand._

I know I don't have to read anymore. This sounds like describing your job as
an elevator operator as "managed a complex interface to adapt to customer
demands by efficiently handling their transport."

She answers it in the first sentence: _Monica Rogati: By definition all
scientists are data scientists._

That's it. Article done. No more SEO bullshit. For that matter, all
statisticians are, too.

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gaius
A "data scientist" is a business analyst who has never worked in industry
before and is unaware that there already is a job title for what they do.

~~~
PaintBucket
Or quantitative analyst, but that sounds like you're participating in some
kind of banking fraud.

~~~
zeratul
I agree. There are different values in data to be discovered not just
business.

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zeratul
The article seems to describe a person who does data mining for living. I
guess "data scientist" sounds better than "data miner".

~~~
re_todd
I've seen a wide variety of job descriptions for these jobs. Sometimes it
sounds like a data miner, sometimes a business analyst, sometimes an
accountant. It's hard to know what a Data Scientist is until you look at the
specific job description.

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olihb
I work in scientometrics, which is like econometrics but with scientific
papers and patents (patents are not optimal, but it's an adequate proxy for
innovation). It's useful to detect new trends in science and adjust funding
accordingly.

We do a lot of data mining, information extraction from very organic sources,
data visualization, etc. It's a growing field and it's very challenging and we
have access to incredible datasets.

I think I fit their definition of a data scientist, but I'll never use that
title. It's pompous and sounds something like someone in marketing would make
up (and I worked as a market research analyst for a number of years). My title
is simply research analyst.

Data scientist is bad, but the worst title I've seen was: web strategist &
tactician

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kyt
The term is pretty broad. I think the difference between a Data Scientist and
a Statistician is the emphasis Data Scientists put on machine learning,
databases, and distributed processing.

