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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently finishing a PhD in economics and have spent a lot of time learning the exact technologies he suggests (Python, SQL, a bit of R). Working as a data scientist would be an awesome opportunity. But are most companies _really_ in need of so many data scientists, or is it just a trend?

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I think it's a new name for an old thing, lots of jobs through the last century had things like "analyst" attached to them. Business has been about measuring things for a long time, look at Taylorism or Gosset at Guinness in 1899 for example.[1][2]

A few little 1% gains from some A/B tests, or looking at geographic breakdowns of customers from IPs or addresses add up.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management

[2]http://www.umass.edu/wsp/statistics/tales/gosset.html

"Data scientist" is a terribly broad term that's begun to encompass a lot of jobs that used to be called "junior analyst" or somesuch.

There certainly is an overlap. But for me, the difference between a Data Scientist and an Analyst is that the Data Scientist uses the data to build stuff (eg a recommendation engine, or a forecasting system). They can also use more technical skills to aid analysis (nlp, scripting, etc).

It is a trend. The question is rather, is it a trend that is likely to persist? And that depends on whether you believe that organizations are likely to capture and store more data or less. If you believe the answer is 'more' then the problem becomes deriving insights from it. And that process - is data science.

Well, if you believe Insight's white paper (http://insightdatascience.com/Insight_White_Paper_2013.pdf), the answer is "Yes".

Dang, the graphics in this are terrible and unreadable. But it "looks" positive.

Thanks for the link. Do you know anyone who went through the program?

Actually, yes. I had dinner on Monday with the author of this article. Obviously Insight worked out very well for him.

This may be too forward, but could you put me in touch? Going the data science route is an option I've been seriously considering for awhile, and this might be the chance I've been looking for.

If you're not comfortable with putting me in touch, that's fine.

Thanks much!

Have you already started into your specialty? Maybe you should do econometrics.

I'm far into my fields. I do econometrics, computational economics, and industrial organization.

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