Data science attracts a wide range of different backgrounds. From my skilled experience, I’ve worked with colleagues who were once:
- Nuclear Physicists
- Post-docs researching Gravitational Waves
- PhD’s in Computational Biology
- Linguists
simply to name just a few.
It’s wonderful to have the opportunity to fulfill such a various set of backgrounds and I actually have seen such a wide range of minds result in the expansion of a creative and effective Data Science function.
Nonetheless, I actually have also seen one big downside to this variety:
Everyone has had different levels of exposure to key Software Engineering concepts, leading to a patchwork of coding skills.
In consequence, I actually have seen work done by some data scientists that’s sensible, but is:
- Unreadable — you could have no idea what they are attempting to do.
