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'Data Science' Is Dead

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the data-however-is-the-lucasian-chair dept.

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."

7 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. data scientist by schneidafunk · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
  2. How appropriate by Micklat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No data has been cited during the creation of that blog post.

    Opinion is fine, but when the observations are so weeping, just a little bit of substantiation is nice to have.

  3. FUD by aBaldrich · · Score: 5, Funny

    How to prevent more people from flocking into your field:

    1) Write a Slashdot article
    2) ???
    3) Profit!

    --
    In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
    1. Re:FUD by aBaldrich · · Score: 5, Informative
      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.

      --
      In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
  4. Not-scientist about science by sega_sai · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The author of this piece clearly have never done actual science, as confirmed by his resume, and his opinions on what science is and that somehow some observational sciences are "soft" are very questionable at best.

  5. 100% disagree by netsavior · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In my career I have worked for boring banks and boring monolithic enterprise software giants.

    If there is one thing I know for certain it is that big enterprise will ALWAYS have a huge appetite for quantification of data. It almost doesn't matter if it actually does anything for you, executives at giant corporations have to DO SOMETHING have to REVIEW SOMETHING. Large scale data aggregation and reporting (one of the many things that go by "big data") might not have sciency uses, but any time a V level can provide a C level with "something" that says "We are doing stuff" there will be a huge market for it.

    Basically what I am saying is, even if "Big Data" is nothing but a placebo, like say "HR Training", "Wellness programs", "performance reviews" or "teambuilding" it is a permanent fixture in the big, boring, high paying, stable job providing corporate world.

  6. Buzzwords by SpankiMonki · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Since "Data Science" is dead, do we go back to using the old buzzwords? Or do we have to wait until some marketing MBA whiz-kid comes up with a sexy new word for "Analyst"?