ReadWriteWeb follows up on our post on the growth in job listings with terms related to data science in a post titled Jobs for Data Scientists Explode Across The Market. (You might have also seen it on the New York Times website.) The article includes quotes from data science thought leaders Pete Warden and Edd Dumbill.
By the way, a couple of readers took issue with my claim that the drop-off in use of "statistician" in job listings is counterbalanced by the use of "data scientist", as the scales in the two charts were quite different. Point well taken. But what it signifies to me is that employers are starting to looking for the skills of statisticians using different terminology, including "data scientist". And as I've written before, I don't think that's a bad thing.
ReadWriteWeb: Jobs for Data Scientists Explode Across The Market
IMO Data Science is a union of Computer Science + Statistics + (X) + Analysis. X is the subject matter knowledge of the application (Finance, NLP, Robotics, Sociology, Biology....you name it). However, analysis is the most important aspect in the corporate/commercial world which is full of constraints not considered when solving academic problems. A cool science experiment has to be eventually put into production and doing so in on legacy systems is no joke. If you want to make changes to legacy systems, you better have the social skills to influence that change in the company or else, solve problems with very tight constraints, meeting all SLAs. And then there is the ever present pressure of 'show me the money'. Quite different from pure Statistics or pure CS or pure (X).
So, Data Scientists may not work on cutting edge stuff...but they have an exciting job nonetheless and power to effect a lot of change (if they have the stomach for it).
Posted by: nick | July 23, 2011 at 10:10