You’re Not a Data Scientist

Many of my friends, colleagues and contacts have started calling themselves Data Scientists. A number of resumes have crossed my desk recently indicating that we’re minting data scientists faster than expected. I’ve seen this movie before.

The IT biz has historically rebranded job titles based upon what’s trending — today’s Software Architects were once known as Designers or Systems Engineers. Nothing is trending faster and louder than predictive analytics, machine learning, deep learning and AI. So it’s our turn to rebrand data geeks as data scientists.

Now don’t get me wrong — some of these folks are legit Data Scientists but the majority is not. I guess I’m a purist –calling yourself a scientist indicates that you practice science following a scientific method. You create hypotheses, test the hypothesis with experimental results and after proving or disproving the conjecture move on or iterate.

The Mind of a Data Scientist

Data science is an applied science. So as an applied scientist you create things —…