Top Highlights

• The data must be organized, well documented, consistently formatted, and error free. Cleaning the data is often the most taxing part of data science, and is frequently 80% of the work.
• Second, data scientists need computing skills, including programming and infrastructure design. A data scientist who lacks the tools to get data from a database into an analysis package and back out again will become a second-class citizen in the technical organization.
• Finally, a data scientist must be able to communicate. Data scientists are valued for their ability to create narratives around their work.
• Early on, Facebook realized that giving everyone access to data was a good thing. Employees didn’t have to put in a request, wait for prioritization, and receive data that might be out of date. This idea was radical because the prevailing belief was that employees wouldn’t know how to access the data, incorrect data would be used to make poor busin...
• All of the major web companies soon followed suit. Being able to access data through SQL became a mandatory skill for those in business functions at organizations like Google and LinkedIn.