4 ms·
In a recent past life, I was a HPC (high performance computing) administrator for a mid size company (just barely S&P400) who was in the transportation industry
by angry_moose 4y ago
In a recent past life, I was a HPC (high performance computing) administrator for a mid size company (just barely S&P400) who was in the transportation industry, so I had a lot of interactions with the "data science" team and it was just a fascinating delusion to watch.
Our CTO did the "Quick, this is the future! I'll be fired if I don't hop on this trend" panic thing and picked up a handful of recent grads and gave them an obscene budget by our company's standard.
The main problem they were expected to solve - forecasting future sales - was functionally equivalent to "predict the next 20 years of ~25% of the world economy". Somehow these 4 guys with a handful of GPUs were expected to out-predict the entirety of the financial sector.
The amazing part was they knew it was crap. All of their stakeholders knew it was crap. Everyone else who heard about it knew it was crap. But our CTO kept paying them a fortune and giving them more hardware every year with almost no expectation of results or performance. It was a common joke (behind the scenes) that if they actually got it right, we'd shut down our original business and becomes the world's largest bank overnight.
At least it finally gave the physics modelers access to some decent GPUs which led to some breakthrough products, as they finally were able to sneak onto some modern hardware.
- fnands 4y agoHonestly, I can't tell you how many jobs ads I saw where I was wondering: "What would they expect me to bring to the table here?" Some companies just don't have the data, or heck even the need, for data scientist yet try and hire them anyway. Give smart people a fundamentally ill-posed problem and they won't get anywhere anyway.
- SilverBirch 4y agoIt’s a great skill to walk in to a job and say “hey I’m the expert, that’s not a reasonable proposal, here’s the problem we can solve and here’s what we’ll do”. Much more value to the company, but hard to do.
- fnands 4y agoYeah I feel a lot of companies could do with running their problems past a consultant first. Also, w.r.t hiring in cases like these, I think often the experienced candidates can smell that this won't be a good gig so don't apply, while the less experienced (or desperate) ones apply. This means the workers get stuck with an intractable problem, and the company gets stuck with workers who are too inexperienced to know better.
- nerpderp82 4y ago> even the need, for ____ ________ yet try and hire them anyway. I think that vast majority of human organizational structures, individuals to large corporations and countries have no clue what they are doing. The most successful apply science and just barely keep their head below the surface by avoiding utter failure. Most people would describe the Olympics as a competition to find out who is the best amateur in a given sport. No, the Olympics is a competition to see who can make the least number of mistakes. If you are going to make bold dumb moves, you need a whole lot of margin.
- NeutralCrane 4y agoIt’s also not rewarded in modern companies. People are rewarded more for worthless garbage produced than worthless garbage avoided. You don’t have much to show for yourself when you talk a company down from making a plunge into a foolhardy, doomed initiative. Pretty soon the bean-counters might wonder why you are being paid when you don’t have as much to show for your work as others. See Elon’s “lines of code” decision making.
- wheels 4y agoMy ex worked at a startup where she was hired as a the second or third data scientist. Their entire Posgress database dump was 20 MB. And they had three people working full time on analyzing ... that 20 MB.
- quickthrower2 4y agoNot the first HN comment I have seen where $real_useful_department borrows resources off overfunded $bullshit_department to get the job done inspite of management.
- mrtksn 4y agoIn retrospect, maybe they made the right call for themselves when the money was pouring. Probably everyone involved was paid very well for the charade. The ethics can be questionable but maybe its some kind of wealth redistribution, after all the people with money are trusted to make the calls and them falling for this maybe simply means the money is beter off somewhere else.