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Airbnb Is Running Its Own Internal University To Teach Data Science (techcrunch.com)
In an effort to fill the demand for trained data scientists, Airbnb will be running its own university-style program, complete with a custom course-numbering system. Since traditional online programs like Coursera and Udacity weren't getting the job done because they weren't tailored to Airbnb's internal data and tools, the company "decided to design a bunch of courses of its own around three levels of instruction for different employee needs," reports TechCrunch. From the report: 100-level classes on data-informed decision making have been designed to be applicable to all teams, including human resources and business development. Middle-tier classes on SQL and Superset have enabled some non-technical employees to take on roles as project managers, and more intensive courses on Python and machine learning have helped engineers brush up on necessary skills for projects. Since launching the program in Q3 2016, Airbnb has seen the weekly active users of its internal data science tools rise from 30 to 45 percent. A total of 500 Airbnb employees have taken at least one class -- and Airbnb has yet to expand the program to all 22 of its offices.
Basically it is a new name for statistics done by computer scientists who don't understand sampling or any theory for the models they are applying. That means most real requirements of those models aren't addressed unless a statistician later looks over their work. There are some add-ons however, and things like cross-validation while logical extensions of the underlying models are typically done with computational tools. The focus is typically on web scrapping with poor consideration for the types of errors that exist, and a large part of faith based belief in a fake census style approach to obtaining meaning from whatever data is gathered.
"A data scientist is a statistician who lives in San Francisco"
Statistics when your sample size is your population.
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Wow, the IT world has changed so much that a company investing in training its employees makes the front page of Slashdot.
Kind thoughts do not change the world