[disgruntledphd2]

Facebook Product Data Science has always been a Product Analyst role more than anything else. I did the interviews a while back, and it was a pretty fun experience, but it's not what a lot of people call data science.

[jstx1]

> but it's not what a lot of people call data science

I think that's changed a bit over time and the term has expanded to mean more things. In addition to Facebook, another great example is this article from Lyft in 2018 where they say that they're renaming all their data analysts to data scientists and all their data scientists to research scientists - https://medium.com/@chamandy/whats-in-a-name-ce42f419d16c

[disgruntledphd2]

This is called title inflation.

Like the hilarious thing about Facebook and Data Science is that the term was invented there, and they needed to retitle all of their analysts (like Product Data Science) as they couldn't hire any analytical people with an analyst title in SV (or so I have been told).

Like, data science was defined back in the days as a social science PhD who could run experiments and write MapReduce jobs. I'm pretty sure that most people would disagree with this definition these days.

[jstx1]

Yes. My point is that the person running experiments and mapreduce jobs is still called a data scientist. But so is the product analytics person (btw product data scientists run experiments too). And there are some other data scientist job profiles too (more focus on research, more focus on engineering etc). So it's not really a complete redefinition of the term, it's more of an expansion of the types of jobs it covers.

[kevinventullo]

In my experience, it varied greatly from team to team.