Every data scientist has to: * be very good at working with large datasets with computational tools (hadoop is an example) * be a decent programmer, scripter,

Every data scientist has to: * be very good at working with large datasets with computational tools (hadoop is an example) * be a decent programmer, scripter, and hacker * have a decent background in statistics A good data scientist: * has a good intuition and business sense * can explain insights to non-technical people (usually through visualization and plotting) * knows machine learning and predictive analytics It's a vague term, but purposefully so. There's tons of stuff you can do with data, a data scientist knows what to do and how to do it.