Point 5, “ Your impact is tough to measure” is also shared by Quality Engineering and SRE, and not unique to Data Science. The point about being a support role holds true for them and it is thoroughly frustrating when a front-end dev makes a small change to a visual element is praised to the roof while complex automation projects by the quality team, ingenious recovery and reliability projects by SRE, and massive and fascinating inferences by data science are undervalued by leadership. The truth is most leaders just can’t connect the dots. I’ve worked as a full stack engineer btw do not taking a dig at front-end work, but it’s clearly easier to measure impact. I’ve worked in quality too and when you’re only called in to ask why one bug got out and never asked about the thousands you’ve stopped it’s demoralizing. It’s part of the reason I started Tesults (https://www.tesults.com), if you’re in one of these support roles, measure, measure and measure and throw those reports into the faces of leadership. It shouldn’t have to be done but without it, the point the author is making here will take place.
> and it is thoroughly frustrating when a front-end dev makes a small change to a visual element is praised to the roof while complex automation projects by the quality team, ingenious recovery and reliability projects by SRE, and massive and fascinating inferences by data science are undervalued by leadership.
I feel this in my bones lol.
The frustration when the results of weeks/months of hard work are glossed over with a “oh that’s nice” in favour of endless praise for the front end team putting a picture backdrop on the search page or something.
Didn’t matter how many times we sold them on the benefits, or explained the work that went into it (at both executive summary level and detail) or did all those things you’re supposed to do, if it was more than one step away from directly causing it, or slightly more abstract than “we moved the button” it was wasted on leadership/management.
Spent a couple of weeks fixing data pipelines and ETL/database infrastructure and processes and now everything runs faster, and runs on a smaller and cheaper cluster and as a result managed to put together some analysis and modelling on customer behaviour that shows if you do xyz you’d expect to see uptick in this thing. Doesn’t matter, Bob changed where the button sits and we saw 20% more sales, good job Bob, everyone: be more like Bob.
