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Comment by bearmf | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading at least 10 articles with nearly the same content during the year. Why are authors so eager to convince everyone of big data's sexiness? Results should speak for themselves. So far Linkedin's Friend Suggest is one of the biggest success stories.

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As a "data scientist" I found this article had much more meaningful content than most articles I've read in the past year. It's not just repeating how data science will be big in the next decade, it discusses who data scientists are and how to hire them.

>So far Linkedin's Friend Suggest is one of the biggest success stories.

I don't agree with this. Google is basically a big data sciences company. 'Data science' may be a new term, but it describes something companies have been doing for decades.

Yeah, big data crunching pervades basically everything Google does. I joined Google as a UI SWE (basically a webdev), and find that most of my daily work nowadays involves processing large amount of data to come up with new features. I suppose I made a conscious effort to move back in the stack to more algorithmic back-end work, but even if you stick with UI work, the launch process is so data-driven that you almost need to have a basic familiarity with statistics & data processing.

I agree that this article is better than average.

>'Data science' may be a new term, but it describes something companies have been doing for decades.

This is not what most articles say. They actually try to frame it as something "new and sexy".

Anything that isn't "normal" news is a PR piece for someone or something - http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Looks like a tech company list looking to hire data scientists - essentially a sneaky job advertisement wrapped up in a fluffy HBR (aren't they all?) article written by a consultant who probably wants to get in on the new new thing.

Or to attract a lot of people to the field and drive down salaries.

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