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What does "Data Scientist" actually mean these days? Does it mean "Write 10 lines of Python or R, and not fully understand what it actually does"? Or something

• threeseed 9y ago
  I hire data scientists so can tell you. It means someone who can work with business stakeholders to break down a problem e.g. "we don't know why customers are churning", produce a machine learning model or some adhoc analysis (usually the former) and either communicate the results back or assist in deploying the model into production. Typically there will be data engineers who will be doing acquisition and cleaning and so the data scientists are all about (a) understanding the data and (b) liaising with stakeholders. As for technologies it is typically R/Python with Spark/H20 on top of a data lake i.e. HDFS, S3. Every now and again on top of an SQL store e.g. EDW, Presto or a Feature store e.g. Cassandra.
• jxub 9y ago
  That's a good meta reflection. Let's make an Y Combinator of Data Scientist a and Data Scientist b (recursive data scientist) to prove they can support recursion if Data Scientists a and b are first class functions, just because we can: const Y = a => (b => b(b))(b => a(x => b(b)(x)));