Data Science, The Sexiest job in the 21st Century

There is a big emphasis that data scientist swim in data. ("They identify rich data sources, join them with other, potentially incomplete data sources, and clean the resulting set", p.4 Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century). Additionally, the articel mentions that data scientist can be the eyes for executives. As such they need to be able to effectively communicate with non technical personals (e.g. story telling).

Additionally, it sounds like data scientist usually have a high autonomy, but need to be curious to fill their potential.

There is also a data scientist shortage.

A data scientist should write reports which tell a executive what to do (that would be effectively be a consultant job). Rather they should work with teams developing customer facing products.

A data scientist should have a deverse background, since their job is to combine multiple data sets. Additionally a data scientist has to be able to communicate their findings with non-technical people (tell a story)

Still the sexiest job

A lot of companies aren't data driven and ignore the advice given by data scientist. This leads to frustration and high turn-over rates.

Data scientist are a common job, in no small part due to the educational offers ramping up.

Another change is that there are not only data scientst, but other related jobs (machine learning engineer, data engineer, AI specialist, analytics and AI translators)

There continouis to be a change in the tools a data scientist uses which causes the job itself to continously change.

Discussion Topic Entry

What do you think were the most interesting aspects of each article?

1. What do you think are the most important skills necessary to be a data scientist?
2. What do you think has been the biggest change in the role of a data scientist from 2012 to 2022?$

The first article introduces that a data scientist swims in data and turns a sea of an unstructured information into structured data. The role of an data scientist is not the one of a consultant, but rather as the eyes of a team developing consumer facing products.

The second article mentions that data scientist are still one of the most sought people by companies, but that the job has been institutionalised and multiple related jobs have sprung up (e.g. data engineer or AI specialist).

A side from being able to code and being strong in math, a data scientist should be able to communicate their findings effectively with their team. Additionally, since data scientist often work with a high degree of autonomy, they need to be naturally curiously and self motivated.

One of the biggest change seems to be that there are offerings from university to study data scientists, while 10 years ago barely any university offered any courses or programs. Along with this, companies also started to figure out who data scientists are and how to hire for them.

Importantly, companies still struggle to get and retain talent in this area.