[justherefortart]

Lmfao, why would a data scientist need to know TCP/IP, Server Setup, SOAP/REST Web Services, SDLC, etc?

Sounds like someone looked up a list of IT stuff you should know and applied it to data scientists randomly. In fact, most of those things in the list may or may not apply to a "software engineer".

[clintonb]

I agree that this knowledge is not necessary, but it could be useful for certain scenarios.

TCP/IP: networking between cluster nodes Server setup: deploy a map-reduce cluster SOAP/REST: read/write data from services Software development life cycle: plan/deploy a reporting system for end users