I don’t like throwing around out the phrase “privileged/out of touch” too often but this post doesn’t seem fit for the top position of HN.
You end up with "we spent years and $ to get the data which says do X, but we don't feel like doing X, so we're just going to ignore it because data in and of itself has no power within the organization".
It's like buying a gym membership and not going to the gym. Having a data science department satisfies the organisation's need to believe it's self-improving.
It is hard to do good data work. Offhand it takes some combination of:
- business understanding and goals (that don't themselves come directly from data)
- using data to effectively orient those goals to the best opportunities
- using data to measure whether you are successful or not
Part of that can involve meta goals -- our data is not sufficient now to meet bullet 2, so we need to start doing something different to measure it.
I find many people in these roles act like they are just human machines producing reports. You really need to take agency in many situations IMO, and direct higher ups to look at data in the right way. If you just wait to be told what report to produce, it will not go well.
And just as most legal disputes end in settlements, most data scientists are excess capacity, kept around because the programmers who will put up with typical dev nonsense aren’t smart enough to hit the high notes… when the fact is that said high notes only need to be hit very, very rarely in business. Being a corporate lawyer comes down to intimidation—no one wants to face off against Apple’s team of lawyers—and 99% of being a corporate data scientist is talking in maths to impress (or defraud) clients and investors.
The past couple decades have seen huge advancements in safety, reduced workplace injuries, auto injuries, etc. all driven in some part by analytics.
This sentiment that “all data analysis = advertising = evil” seems very reductive. It reminds me of all the comments I see from my technical peers about how “useless” other departments are such as HR and Sales, when they’re fundamental to a healthy business which pays the salaries of programmers.