Who hires them and how do they find clients? (on their own or are they working for McKinsey or similar group?)
And if you have details, how much can they charge?
Edit: in my experience it is not very easy to get paid to just crunch numbers. Even if you can find a job that is supposed to be analytics, 90% of the work is data munging.
I am in the online-advertising business, and I know them from the "scene"; usually what you wanna look out for are "analyst" titles advertised by marketing and PR agencies. Wherever you see an ad for programmer, ring up the hiring person and inquire about analyst positions (you might actually have to explain the need and create your own position, possibly starting as a consultant.)
I know these guys, like I said, from the "scene", but two of them I ran into responding to their ad; it was a badly phrased ad for a "developer" position, but after a 30 minute conversation it was apparent they wanted someone with machine-learning and distributed computing background who could scale their spreadsheets :-)
If there is demand, I am more than happy to get into the head-hunting business as a side-gig ;-)
As a part of my continuous moral degradation and the resulting increasing alignment with the forces of Evil
It is really hard to dis an article that has consulting and math and starts off like this. Very nicely done.
The rest of the article was rather mundane, sadly.
True consulting is just having a paid smart friend. Why do you need paid smart friends? Are you not smart enough? Don't you have enough friends where you work? Sure, but a _real_ friend will tell you things that are glaringly obvious yet could get them fired. A real friend will take on your problems as their own and worry about them along with you. A really smart person (in this context) probably has seen many more types of business models than the full-timers at your place have. A really smart person (in this context) probably has ways of working with people that you either haven't tried or tried and didn't understand (because you were busy doing your regular work)
It sounds trivial, but a paid smart friend (business consultant) can mean the difference between kicking ass and becoming mediocre.
Of course, I have fully become part of the dark side, taking the secret oath, learning the handshake, and swearing my allegiance to the forces of darkness and chaos, so all of this just may be misinformation on my part. :)
Don't know, but I know that even if I never have a successful startup, learning and watching startups has done more for my business consulting career than a thousand college degrees ever would. (wink)
It is VERY hard, but doable. I am trying to make living doing machine learning freelancing, although this part of "business" makes me just about 10 - 20% of income.
As someone wrote on this forum: most clients want to just scale their Excel spreadsheets and models. There are plenty of similar jobs aroud, so VBA should be your friend.
I then trying to educate my customers on machine learning related topics and sometimes I've got another ML-related projects.
If you choose this, be prepare to spend a lot of time doing nonbillable work, so pay will not be so great at start, but I hope that it will pays in long term.
I know a few people who do nothing but crunch numbers on social media, political campaigns, and online marketing and advertising.