Airbnb Tech Talk: Josh Wills of Cloudera, on Growing Data Scientists
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BTW thanks Airbnb for holding these talks!
A DS is a BA without sufficient industry experience to know there is already a job doing what they do...
Ordinary data analysis generally lives in a world where the computer is fast enough, and you need domain knowledge + basic stats. The term "Data Scientist", when properly used, deals with cases where domain knowledge + basic stats isn't sufficient, and computer science knowledge is also required.
[1] Many people who advertise for a "data scientist" really just need a BA or a DBA. I recently turned down a job as a "data scientist" after telling them that Hadoop is massive overkill. `SELECT SUM(x) FROM table WHERE condition` took about 4 seconds to run. Admittedly, the ruby script they were using to do it row by row was a lot slower, particularly since they were loading the entire row rather than just field `x`.
This is just an anecdote... And Perhaps some people make the BA/DS distinction so this isn't the relevant comparison. But the returns to smart people and sharp tools is astounding.
If companies aren't being silly, business analysts != data scientist. You still need to be comfortable with various statistical distributions, learning algorithms, graphical models, genetic algos, and possibly some NLP.
Best example I can use: at Knewton I work with two data scientists who can jump from belief propagation or genetic algorithms to infrastructural discussions at the drop of a hat. I don't think business analysts can do that.
yummyfajitas gets it right below: most companies need an analyst, not a DS. That doesn't mean there's no need for a DS.