Twice weekly, I share proven strategies to help data scientists get noticed, promoted, and valued. No theory — just practical steps to transform your technical expertise into business impact and the freedom to call your own shots.
Never Put the Low Priorities First
|
There’s a Calvin and Hobbes comic that perfectly captures why your data science career isn’t advancing. In the strip, Hobbes suggests Calvin prioritise his chores over having fun, so that once he’s done, he can enjoy the rest of the day without worry. The punchline is that by the time Calvin finishes his chores, the day is over and his mother appears to send him off to bed. Many data scientists are Calvin. We tell ourselves we’ll work on that high-impact analysis after we finish these status updates. Here’s the thing… As Calvin discovered, chores have a habit of expanding to fill your available time. And no data scientist has ever been promoted for achieving inbox zero. Try this instead: Start with what matters.
Your career advances based on the problems you solve, not the emails you answer. Never put the low priorities first. Talk again soon, Dr Genevieve Hayes |
Data Science Impact Algorithm
Twice weekly, I share proven strategies to help data scientists get noticed, promoted, and valued. No theory — just practical steps to transform your technical expertise into business impact and the freedom to call your own shots.
Most data scientists think the hardest part of experimentation is the statistics. It’s not. It’s telling people their ideas didn’t work. Here’s a reality check about experimentation: Even at companies like Google and Netflix, 70-90% of experiments don’t show positive results. That means if you’re running A/B tests, you’ll be delivering “bad news” far more often than good news. Now imagine being the data scientist who constantly tells people their ideas didn’t work. How long before...
"The show doesn't go on because it's ready; it goes on because it's 11:30." - Lorne Michaels, creator of Saturday Night Live. Data scientists can learn a lot from Saturday Night Live. SNL has a rule: The show goes on at 11:30. Not when it’s perfect. Not when everyone’s happy with it. At 11:30. Many years ago, I was responsible for performing the annual workcover premium rate calculation for the whole of Victoria. It was a calculation of the utmost importance - $2b in revenue depended on it...
For the 4 1/2 years of my PhD, I worked with a de-identified dataset that felt like nothing more than numbers on a page. Cold. Abstract. Disconnected from any real human experience. Each “person” was just a line in an Excel spreadsheet, with an ID in place of a name. When I started my first role in insurance pricing, my mindset initially remained the same. That was until my boss took me along to speak to a policyholder - putting me face-to-face with one of the people my data actually...