[rrjjww]

The author seems to extrapolate from their experience of having a “six figure data job straight out of college clocking out at 5pm everyday producing no value” (paraphrasing) that all “data work” must be producing no societal value.

I don’t like throwing around out the phrase “privileged/out of touch” too often but this post doesn’t seem fit for the top position of HN.

[throw_pm23]

I disagree, the author has touched on something widespread and hard to articulate that I suspect a large part of the HN readers have had experience with.

[pjc50]

The problem is that lots of organisations say they want to be "data driven" but then leave all the management decisions to the prejudices of individual managers as well as management as a whole within the organisation. It's a problem that's been with us since Taylorism and the dawn of "scientific management".

You end up with "we spent years and $ to get the data which says do X, but we don't feel like doing X, so we're just going to ignore it because data in and of itself has no power within the organization".

It's like buying a gym membership and not going to the gym. Having a data science department satisfies the organisation's need to believe it's self-improving.

[apwheele]

I found it resonated (although agree the title is click-baity, they just talk about their own experiences in multiple orgs).

It is hard to do good data work. Offhand it takes some combination of:

- business understanding and goals (that don't themselves come directly from data)

- using data to effectively orient those goals to the best opportunities

- using data to measure whether you are successful or not

Part of that can involve meta goals -- our data is not sufficient now to meet bullet 2, so we need to start doing something different to measure it.

I find many people in these roles act like they are just human machines producing reports. You really need to take agency in many situations IMO, and direct higher ups to look at data in the right way. If you just wait to be told what report to produce, it will not go well.

[pilarphosol]

Being a data scientist is what I imagine being a lawyer is for idealists who go into the profession. They think there is an underlying reality that holds bad actors to account—for attorneys, this is the institution of “The Law”—but, in fact, most of the job is helping those bad actors justify what they already wanted to do anyway.

And just as most legal disputes end in settlements, most data scientists are excess capacity, kept around because the programmers who will put up with typical dev nonsense aren’t smart enough to hit the high notes… when the fact is that said high notes only need to be hit very, very rarely in business. Being a corporate lawyer comes down to intimidation—no one wants to face off against Apple’s team of lawyers—and 99% of being a corporate data scientist is talking in maths to impress (or defraud) clients and investors.

[jeffreygoesto]

Care to elaborate where the value created for millions of people is in an industry that pivoted years ago to focus on ad revenue and psychological tricks to extract money from 'whales'?

[rrjjww]

Sure, advertising is collectively a multi-trillion dollar industry propelled largely by computer/data science, but it is still only a fraction of overall economic activity driven by advancements in data analysis.

The past couple decades have seen huge advancements in safety, reduced workplace injuries, auto injuries, etc. all driven in some part by analytics.

This sentiment that “all data analysis = advertising = evil” seems very reductive. It reminds me of all the comments I see from my technical peers about how “useless” other departments are such as HR and Sales, when they’re fundamental to a healthy business which pays the salaries of programmers.

[seydor]

Most of jobs in academia are like that. Everyone knows it, some few admit it, most do not want to rock the boat.

[datatrashfire]

Having worked in data in many different environments including market research, Fortune 100, unicorn startups I beg to differ.

[slotrans]

It's extremely accurate, though. He described 4 of the last 6 jobs I've had, as if he had been there with me.