I can relate to the “looking at data” as a skill bit, especially the part where he mentions that it’s not a skill most data scientists necessarily have. I have

I can relate to the “looking at data” as a skill bit, especially the part where he mentions that it’s not a skill most data scientists necessarily have. I have observed that too. (I’m one myself) Many data scientists like to jump into feature extraction and modeling the data with ML/DS tools because for us that’s the fun part. (we might look at some plots and summary statistics but we don’t dwell there for too long.) Few have the patience to just sit with the data for a week just to look at it, checking it against our intuition about the real world and the domain and basically just trying to put 2 and 2 together without models (except a mental model of the world) and just turning the data over in Tableau (or Excel). It’s actually not an easy skill to learn because it requires other meta skills. For one it requires an ability to match numbers to the real world — and for that you need experience and a good intuition of how the world works. My first manager was exceptionally good at doing this. I’ve noticed too that folks in senior management — at least competent ones — tended to be good at looking at data and picking out things too. I suspect this is actually a make or break ability to get to senior management at most companies. Data scientists, not so much. (Unless they worked in the field or came from the business side of things.)