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.
The Most Useful Thing You Can Do Right Now
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Even at the best of times, the world is an uncertain place. Right now, we are far from the best of times. In periods of high uncertainty, people naturally seek out anything that might reduce that uncertainty - even just a little. Politicians understand this instinctively, which is why we've seen so many world leaders addressing their people in recent weeks, with varying degrees of success. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the value of any reduction in it. This principle doesn't stop at the geopolitical level. It applies just as much within your organisation. Your stakeholders are people, too. And while, as a data scientist, you're unlikely to be able to resolve the current global situation, you're uniquely positioned to do something genuinely valuable: help the people around you make better decisions under uncertainty, with the information available to them right now. That's not a small thing. In an environment where so much feels outside everyone's control, being the person who brings clarity - by helping leadership understand what they know, what they don't know and the level of uncertainty they're facing - is one of the most useful things a data scientist can do. It's worth remembering that this is exactly what you were trained to do. 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.
In a recent blog post, CFO advisor and friend of the list Lauren Pearl discussed the impact of AI on the age-old software “build vs buy” decision. In short, Lauren argued that AI-driven vibe coding has made building software in-house far more appealing when the stakes are low, but when stakes are high, buying is still the way to go. To quote Lauren: “When you buy software, you don’t just buy the code. You buy a support team, expert-derived flows, tested features, platform trust, regular...
Ten years ago, everyone wanted to be doing machine learning. Go to a data conference - someone was presenting on ML. Advertising a data role - just mention ML and applications would 10X. It was the promise of machine learning that inspired an entire generation of data scientists. I know. I was one of them. And then came the statistic that revealed what many data scientists knew but few wanted to admit: around 90% of ML initiatives never made it to deployment. The ideas were there. The...
Last week, I stepped on the fancy scales at my gym for the first time in four months. You know the ones. They don’t just tell you your weight. They tell you your muscle mass, bone density, basal metabolic rate… Basically, everything short of your star sign. The results were horrifying. Everything had gone backwards. I’d even managed to lose 400 grams of muscle. I’d been training five days a week and made no major changes to my diet. I was lifting heavier weights than ever before. None of it...