Fortune: Data Science is the hot new job

An article in the September 5 issue of Fortune Magazine notes that despite the economy, companies are scrambling to hire data scientists:

Data scientists have been a fixture at online companies like Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN) for years. But these days organizations as diverse as Wal-Mart (WMT) and Foursquare are hiring computer science experts who can analyze all their data and provide intelligence that leads to better business decisions or new products. At Bitly, the URL-shortening service, for example, chief scientist Hilary Mason is helping the company package some of its massive volume of data into a measurement tool that Bitly customers can use to track how their content is faring online.

The growth of data science is just another good reason to learn R. R is the tool of choice for many data scientists, and several R users will be presenting at the next data science conference, Strata NY 2011 (sponsored by Revolution Analytics).

CNN Money: Data scientist: The hot new gig in tech

Comments

[Yihui]

I'll go to this Strata conference, but I only stay there on 20 and 21. If you are going there as well, I'd happy to talk to you for a couple of minutes on our R conferences in China (which I planned to but did not manage to do last time at JSM).

[Blaise F Egan]

> Wal-Mart (WMT) and Foursquare are hiring computer science experts

Now if they only realised that statisticians are also data experts this would be great!

[David Smith]

@Blaise, I think that's why the title "Data Scientist" is useful. For some companies, hiring for "statistician" implies research, not application (which almost certainly involves CS skills). So they've resorted to hiring computer scientists. By presenting ourselves as "data scientists" we can give employers the confidence we have both statistics skills and software-based data management skills.

[C Waggoner]

Is there a well-known site for data-scientist job postings? Other than indeed.