Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Another variation of Lewis Carroll’s “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” This time we apply it to hiring data scientists.

“We can’t hire enough data scientists.” At least I read that almost everyday out there on the Internet. Well, why can’t we? Here are a few of my reasons.

(Reason 1) We keep raising the bar. It is not enough to (a) know programming, (b) know math, science, and statistics, and (c) know a subject area. Now we need to know artificial intelligence and machine learning as well.

“If you cannot deploy six different regression models on AWS SageMaker in less than 15 minutes, you are not a data scientist.” Or so the thinking goes.

(Reason 2) We keep lowering the bar. We want to “democratize” data science so that you drag a data file into a GUI, type a question, and hit Return.

(Reason 3) I guess we can’t agree on a definition of a data scientist. Hiring an Electrical Engineer is much easier; look at the college diploma. We don’t have many folks running around with a diploma that says “data science.” Hence, we have to think a while before hiring, and thinking gives us a headache.

We have the unknowing trying to find the undefined. Any road will get us there or get us lost in the woods. The results are predictable and predicted.