Member-only story
The Sad Reality: Not Enough Actual Data Science
Last letter to my boss after I quit
Although this article is about quitting my Data Science job, it is not so much about how I quit as opposed to why.
Is about trying to highlight an issue that through my 6+ years of experience in this career, I consider to be a prevalent one.
Something I’ve openly discussed among peers at different companies, but that deserves more light shined upon it.
This was my last letter to my boss after I quit:
Dear Manager,
To keep our Data Scientists feeling adequately challenged, engaged, and happy, we need to take a more strategic approach when deciding the types of projects they get assigned.
Most, if not all, of our Data Scientists, have a clear idea of which type of projects they enjoy the most and which will have the biggest impact on their career development. As a good starting point, at this company, these are usually the projects that involve very little data modeling and require the use of advanced analytics techniques (e.g. Doing “Causal Impact” analysis to attribute a certain uplift to our metrics or “Survival Analysis” for customer churn prediction).
Every Data Scientist should have the ability to do those types of projects from time to time. It's important to ensure these more “advanced“ analytics projects don’t always get assigned to the same person or get disregarded altogether.
Operational work is important but so is Advanced Analytical work.
The former ensures we keep things running properly, our data models, our dashboards, etc…, and the latter has the potential of opening the door to new business opportunities or optimizing the way we do things, which can reduce cost and in turn increase return on investment.
The former is often prioritized because it is in front of our faces and it’s simply much easier to get started with, and the latter requires vision and the courage to take risks. Not every analysis will result in groundbreaking results, some will stop at “We don’t have the proper data to continue further“, but they always provide valuable learnings. And sometimes they help our stakeholders realize there is a great…
