Data Scientists emerged about four years ago as THE must-have employee. Everyone in tech scrambled to brush off the old statistics books from courses they’d taken in college, spent some serious time relearning Python Pandas and R, learned the latest in Machine Learning theory, and bought new lab coats for good measure. I know I did.
If you were a Hadoop developer it was also the place to be, because everyone knew that you couldn’t be a good data scientist if you couldn’t map/reduce. It may even have staved off the imminent collapse of Hadoop companies for a few years more, with Indian programmer mills churning out new Hadoop programmers and data science “specialists” by the thousands to take advantage of the next big thing.
Companies bought into it, big time. Every company worth its place on the Nasdaq board paid these data scientists BIG BUCKS, with the idea that before you knew it, their companies would be surging against their competitors, and sales managers and C-Suite executives could count on powering up their iPads in the morning to see exactly how well their company was operating right then and there. Dashboards became the next big status symbols — senior executives would get the ultra-deluxe dashboards with the 3D visualizations and real time animated scatter plots, while their more junior counterparts would get the flat-tone 2D versions and minimal…
