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It's very hard to know what creates value without more senior leadership experience. Sometimes it's only '1 thing out of 10' but that '1 thing' is absolutley e

by jasmer 4y ago

It's very hard to know what creates value without more senior leadership experience. Sometimes it's only '1 thing out of 10' but that '1 thing' is absolutley essential. But honestly, I suggest the entire 'big data' movement is a bit outlandish, there really isn't a need for most of it. The 'saving grace' frankly is AI, because maybe-maybe-maybe we can make use of that data in some future alg because god knows we're really not making that much of use of it. But it's hard.

baxtr 4y ago
This. So many people underestimate the value of experience. Seeing patterns comes with seeing many different things over an extended period of time.
- jeffreygoesto 4y ago
  I think the author wound have been very grateful if at least some of the seniors would have seen it as part of the leading task to craft some reward structure for their subordinates. Like that barber did. Life is so much nicer when money is for people, not the other way round.
- spaceprison 4y ago
  The teams that brought value to the company were embedded alongside of the folks producing the data to be 'scienced' and had leadership that was able to understand and communicate the information (and its limits) to their leaders and adjacent teams and use their experience to point the data science folks in the right direction.
stuartjohnson12 4y ago
Anecdotally, it seems like companies advertising data + AI capacities are the worst offenders when it comes to buzzwords and grift. Also anecdotally, I know the founder of a small agency that does rapid prototyping of predictive models for logistics-heavy industries and adds a lot of value. I think the problem is really one of scale - it's way harder to pin down your value add when you're part of a very large collective. Being responsible for 10% of a 10-man output is much more tangible than being responsible for 0.001% of a 10,000-man output, and the difference between 10% and 0% is similarly much easier to discern from a management and accountability perspective.
what-the-grump 4y ago
A lot of times senior leadership isn’t equipped to communicate the data requirement to achieve a task. So data people, technologists, dbas, are shooting from the hip trying to fit a square into a round hole. Once the target is hit, most of the work to hit that target is worthless, but we’ve gotten smarter at taking the journey and creating repeatable steps, setting up data structures, etc.
- jasmer 4y ago
  I also worked at a company that had antiquated data storage practices and ugly political silos around it to the point where it was kafkaesque to access basic operating data which was actually valuable. ... and were the goddam strategy team! I really depends so much on leadership as well. I suggest most companies either have 'Zero IT' leadership knowledge, in which case you get the 'buy whatever Microsoft tells us to buy' - or they are tech companies where they understand it but are probably a bit overzealous. But the same thing applies to everything. 'Legal' can be a useless waste of money, until all of a sudden they're the most important team in the company ...

by jasmer 4y ago

baxtr 4y ago

This. So many people underestimate the value of experience. Seeing patterns comes with seeing many different things over an extended period of time.

jeffreygoesto 4y ago
I think the author wound have been very grateful if at least some of the seniors would have seen it as part of the leading task to craft some reward structure for their subordinates. Like that barber did. Life is so much nicer when money is for people, not the other way round.
spaceprison 4y ago
The teams that brought value to the company were embedded alongside of the folks producing the data to be 'scienced' and had leadership that was able to understand and communicate the information (and its limits) to their leaders and adjacent teams and use their experience to point the data science folks in the right direction.

stuartjohnson12 4y ago

Anecdotally, it seems like companies advertising data + AI capacities are the worst offenders when it comes to buzzwords and grift. Also anecdotally, I know the founder of a small agency that does rapid prototyping of predictive models for logistics-heavy industries and adds a lot of value. I think the problem is really one of scale - it's way harder to pin down your value add when you're part of a very large collective. Being responsible for 10% of a 10-man output is much more tangible than being responsible for 0.001% of a 10,000-man output, and the difference between 10% and 0% is similarly much easier to discern from a management and accountability perspective.

what-the-grump 4y ago

A lot of times senior leadership isn’t equipped to communicate the data requirement to achieve a task. So data people, technologists, dbas, are shooting from the hip trying to fit a square into a round hole. Once the target is hit, most of the work to hit that target is worthless, but we’ve gotten smarter at taking the journey and creating repeatable steps, setting up data structures, etc.

jasmer 4y ago
I also worked at a company that had antiquated data storage practices and ugly political silos around it to the point where it was kafkaesque to access basic operating data which was actually valuable. ... and were the goddam strategy team! I really depends so much on leadership as well. I suggest most companies either have 'Zero IT' leadership knowledge, in which case you get the 'buy whatever Microsoft tells us to buy' - or they are tech companies where they understand it but are probably a bit overzealous. But the same thing applies to everything. 'Legal' can be a useless waste of money, until all of a sudden they're the most important team in the company ...