In the circles I run around in, everybody does. But my contacts are not representative of the population at large, so I’m curious as to how widespread it is elsewhere.
Link for the curious.
You should have had a ‘sort of’ option. I didn’t know what a formal definition was until I saw your link, but where I work we just call them people.
Agreed. I understand the job description; I’ve just never heard anyone call themselves one. I guessed more or less correctly, though.
Never heard the term before.
I don’t really understand what it is even after reading the wiki article.
Nope. Forced choice.
Same here. I don’t get how it’s different from a regular scientist, or mathematician, or statistician.
(Oh, and I work in research - I’m skewing the data by refusing to vote, woohoo!)
I guessed what you meant and voted yes - but I work for a company which makes these products, published a review of a book on data mining, and work in the area myself now - and have heard no one call themselves or anyone else a data scientist. Analytics, referred to in your link, is much more common.
Agreed. The article just seemed to be a lot of buzzwords strung together. Oh and data scientists are really, really expert in all sorts of things, so many things that no-one really is expert in them all. There is really very little indication of what sort of problems a data scientist might work on, how they might solve those problems, or what a “data science” solution might look like.
It is hard to tell whether this is just because it is a bad Wiki article, or whether “data science” is a bullshit field. (Perhaps a bullshitty way of rebranding stuff that people have been doing under different names for ages.)
Is it to do with data mining, or maybe information science, because I have a general idea what those are?
It’s the plural of datum scientist.
My alternate joke before I decided to go with the above:
“Is data scientist?”
“No. Data janitor. Dat guy over dere in da white coat, data scientist.”
I don’t know what it is, but the wiki article makes it sound really tedious.
I’ve never heard the term, but I guessed about right… I think. Like others I’m a bit confused by Wikipedia’s description. It mostly reminds me of most of the machine learning people I know that specialize in data mining (as opposed to cognition, game playing, etc).
This sounds like my dream job. Too bad I’ve invested years and years of time and money into a completely different field.
That has to be one of the most poorly written wikipedia articles I’ve ever seen. Granted I could only suffer through the first couple paragraphs. I left completely unenlightened.
No, I don’t know what a data scientist is, and on a related note, don’t really understand what synergy is either.
This is a pretty good description of the whole thing. Maybe 10 years ago this seemed like it would be a ‘thing’, but now it’s just what’s done with computers.
It’s telling that no one here has heard of a person who calls themself a ‘data scientist’.
My job title is statistician. I am part of a Quantitative Sciences group. My last job had an internal “Data Sciences Meeting” every year. So I would say that I know what a data scientist is.
I read the OP, guessed the answer was a fancy way of describing a statistician, then checked the link to see if I was right. And then voted “no” on that basis. I still think my answer is better, though.
I believe this is what Edward Tufte is. I’ve done his one day course and have a several of his books. Fascinating stuff if you’re someone responsible for creating, distributing, or presenting.
I have been called a business analyst and I know what this term means.
I would think that, mathematicians excepted, any scientist would be a data scientist. You can’t do science without data.