19 Jan How to hire a data scientist
We’re getting Big Data all wrong, and it’s holding us back. By making a fetish of the volume of data we’re collecting, we’ve completely overlooked the most important aspect of our data: analyzing it.
Such analysis is often assumed to be the province of data scientists, those magical unicorns that take one look at a company’s data and declare, “Buy low, sell high!”
Because data scientists can be the difference between success and failure in a company’s use of its data, finding the right kind is critical. It turns out that discovering the right data scientist is similar to analyzing one’s data: you need to make sure you’re hiring the right kind, and that you ask them the right questions.
Data Is Not The Point
As Alistair Croll writes of the Internet of Things mess, a lot of our Big Data projects thus far mainly involve finding ways to acquire and store ever increasing quantities of data, which isn’t really the point.
In fact, though the “Big” in Big Data gets the headlines, most companies don’t have petabyte-scale data problems. What they have is a problem understanding what data they have.