Why does someone always say this? What are you supposed to ask these people, "hey, are you good at communicating?" "is u good with data?"? You need technical qu

Why does someone always say this? What are you supposed to ask these people, "hey, are you good at communicating?" "is u good with data?"? You need technical questions somewhere, and if you ask someone specific technical questions then you're being a pedantic dick, but if you broaden it (like these questions), you're only asking easily looked-up knowledge. I mean, come on. Many of these questions are foundational or semi-foundational questions, and if you're not asking those then how can you possibly tell if someone understands the basics? I don't care that someone can look up what an ROC curve is, I care that they can explain why it's used and the relationship between TP, FP, recall, precision, etc., and why these distinctions are important. And yes, your last sentence is correct, but it's ONLY correct when the individual actually understands the foundational parts of ds/stats. If they don't, then it doesn't really matter what questions they ask or how good their communication is. For some reason there is this widespread notion that in DS, because the data is so important, and so tied into the business logic/processes, that you don't need to know the math, and that's just not true. That's how you end up with "data scientists" working in excel and putting out meaningless reports that no one ever uses because they can never get to any real, actionable results because anything more than linear regression is an impossible task.