This comment makes wild assumptions, doesn't assume best intentions, and really just makes `brenden2` sound like a nasty person. Yet here it is, top comment on the front page.
Nice work OP! You are flexing a very unique set of muscles (technical + leadership + communication + ambition) that very few people have. You will go far in life.
My personal goal is for my beliefs and my participation in a community to above all be accurate. If the fact-based conclusions aren’t very pleasant, that is a function of the state of the world, not the state of participation.
Overall it results in a fairly balanced forum.
None of this is new - it's happened to all industries after they became sufficiently mainstream. Take a look at aviation - at first it was the wild west at the beginning of the century, then WW1 and WW2 brought some rapid advances, and in the last 70 years things have been relatively stale. Anyone dreaming of designing the next airliner today is a very different person from those who designed them at the beginning of that cycle.
I am not even saying there's anything wrong with all of this. As an industry matures and becomes more mainstream (aka, affects more people), we have to put some safety mechanisms in place. That means discussions become more about safety and less about achievement, and this attracts a fundamentally different group of people - more average, more bitter.
Kudos to the OP: just like syndacks, I am rooting for him and hope he'll use his enthusiasm to continue to shoot for the stars!
I'd put it another way : it makes room for many people to participate in the social life by mean of work in the civil aviation.
So, from being a domain ruled by elite (of gifted or lucky or rich persons), it ends up a to be a domain of emancipation for big parts of society...
I would say this is true for all mid-management and up. Tech proficiency is largely irrelevant once you go into management.
The lack of tech proficiency is even an advantage: in the companies where I worked, it is people who sucked badly at the technical job they had, who were moved to management, hoping that they might be less useless there. They are happy, they are paid twice as much as others who could fulfil their tasks, so it must mean they're good at something (something difficult to assess otherwise so money must be the right measurement). And then, since it is almost impossible to differentiate between a good and a bad manager, they could thrive a few decades going up in those roles, jumping from a company to another, boasting about the number of projects they 'made' (which are naturally more numerous than for the people who actually worked deeply on them).
This lies in stark contrast to the three other managers I've had for any length of time, who have all been considerably more technical and considerably less good at those other things. They've been able to step in and help fight fires in a way that the above manager couldn't have, but they haven't been as good at keeping their part of the organization running smoothly. Thing is, the latter is a manager's job, and the former isn't.
I mostly see management and implementation as orthogonal skills, with the caveat that experience is industry-specific in both cases.
You seem to be agreeing with me then. Of course you can be a bad VP Data Scientist without knowing anything about data science!
The job of a Data Science leader at a growing company is 50% recruiting and 50% sitting in planning meetings. Even if you started with good IC knowledge after a few years your skills will be rusty as hell. So assuming you know nothing and trusting your team and delegating is going to work infinitely better than trusting your own out of date skills.
edit: And yes, this is from personal knowledge, I've held such titles before and I've had a lot of offers for other such titles.
edit2: As a corollary, promoting someone to management just because they're a good IC is a really bad idea. You want your top ICs to stay ICs if possible. You want your managers to be people who actually can manage and want to manage.
Good scientific skills never go out of date. Being a good data scientist is not the same thing as knowing the big data framework du jour.
I accept that in many cases people with the job title 'data scientist' do not have any scientific skills, but that's a different matter.
I'd love to say it's only prone in startups but it's been plaguing companies forever, especially small-medium sized ones where it's easier because the owner is probably hoping to find able hands, perhaps the huge ones have slightly better processes to counter this type of scenario.
Success is mostly based upon who you know and being at the right place at the right time. That's why it's disingenuous to suggest you can "teach" how to be successful with blog posts like this -- you can't teach someone how to be born into the right family so they can attend the right school and meet the right people.