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I find your comment rather funny, but you are forgetting some very relevant skills a DS is expected to have like NoSQL knowledge, MapReduce (Hadoop), some decen

I find your comment rather funny, but you are forgetting some very relevant skills a DS is expected to have like NoSQL knowledge, MapReduce (Hadoop), some decent language to interact with... I don't think it's that easy to find somebody with these skills. BTW thanks Airbnb for holding these talks!

gaius 14y ago
Right, but BAs have been doing SPSS, SAS, Mathematica, MATLAB, R etc, etc for decades. Any BA worth his or her salt could pick up these new things without breaking a sweat - they are not rocket science, and the value of a BA is in their knowledge of statistics and industry domain knowledge. A DS is a BA without sufficient industry experience to know there is already a job doing what they do...
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  I don't really agree with this. A "Data Scientist" (as the term is "properly" used [1]) generally needs to be a very good computer scientist in addition to understanding the data. Ordinary data analysis generally lives in a world where the computer is fast enough, and you need domain knowledge + basic stats. The term "Data Scientist", when properly used, deals with cases where domain knowledge + basic stats isn't sufficient, and computer science knowledge is also required. [1] Many people who advertise for a "data scientist" really just need a BA or a DBA. I recently turned down a job as a "data scientist" after telling them that Hadoop is massive overkill. `SELECT SUM(x) FROM table WHERE condition` took about 4 seconds to run. Admittedly, the ruby script they were using to do it row by row was a lot slower, particularly since they were loading the entire row rather than just field `x`.
- deleted 14y ago
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- dbecker 14y ago
  Different people mean different things by the BA/DS distinction. But I've seen a team of 15 people with SAS experience try to get into machine learning applications, and they are making less progress than I would expect from a single good ML practitioner (with R or Python experience). This is just an anecdote... And Perhaps some people make the BA/DS distinction so this isn't the relevant comparison. But the returns to smart people and sharp tools is astounding.

gaius 14y ago

Right, but BAs have been doing SPSS, SAS, Mathematica, MATLAB, R etc, etc for decades. Any BA worth his or her salt could pick up these new things without breaking a sweat - they are not rocket science, and the value of a BA is in their knowledge of statistics and industry domain knowledge. A DS is a BA without sufficient industry experience to know there is already a job doing what they do...

yummyfajitas 14y ago
I don't really agree with this. A "Data Scientist" (as the term is "properly" used [1]) generally needs to be a very good computer scientist in addition to understanding the data. Ordinary data analysis generally lives in a world where the computer is fast enough, and you need domain knowledge + basic stats. The term "Data Scientist", when properly used, deals with cases where domain knowledge + basic stats isn't sufficient, and computer science knowledge is also required. [1] Many people who advertise for a "data scientist" really just need a BA or a DBA. I recently turned down a job as a "data scientist" after telling them that Hadoop is massive overkill. `SELECT SUM(x) FROM table WHERE condition` took about 4 seconds to run. Admittedly, the ruby script they were using to do it row by row was a lot slower, particularly since they were loading the entire row rather than just field `x`.
deleted 14y ago
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dbecker 14y ago
Different people mean different things by the BA/DS distinction. But I've seen a team of 15 people with SAS experience try to get into machine learning applications, and they are making less progress than I would expect from a single good ML practitioner (with R or Python experience). This is just an anecdote... And Perhaps some people make the BA/DS distinction so this isn't the relevant comparison. But the returns to smart people and sharp tools is astounding.