'Data Science' Is Dead

Nerval's Lobster writes "If you're going to make up a cool-sounding job title for yourself, 'Data Scientist' seems to fit the bill. When you put 'Data Scientist' on your resume, recruiters perk up, don't they? Go to the Strata conference and look on the jobs board — every company wants to hire Data Scientists. Time to jump aboard that bandwagon, right? Wrong, argues Miko Matsumura in a new column. 'Not only is Data Science not a science, it's not even a good job prospect,' he writes. 'Companies continue to burn millions of dollars to collect and gamely pick through the data under respective roofs. What's the time-to-value of the average "Big Data" project? How about "Never?"' After the 'Big Data' buzz cools a bit, he argues, it will be clear to everyone that 'Data Science' is dead and the job function of 'Data Scientist' will have jumped the shark."

Comments

data scientist

[schneidafunk]

Call yourself a statistician or database engineer and I promise there are still jobs around. And contrary to the summary, they are highly valuable jobs.

Re:FUD

[aBaldrich]

According to this guy, Mathematics is not a science because you don't conduct experiments. The key error is this:

Science creates knowledge via controlled experiments

Which is false. Science checks hypotheses and tries to prove them, or makes repeated experiments that show the failure to disprove them.