Data Science is Seductive : datascience
I joined this mid-sized financial industry company (~500 employees) some time ago as a Dev Manager. One thing lead to another and now I'm a Data Science Manager.
I am not an educated Data Scientist. No PhD or masters, just a CS degree + 15 years of software development experience, mostly with Python and Java. I always liked analytics and data, and over the years I did a lot of data sciency work (e.g: pretty reports with insights, predictions, dashboards, etc...) that management and different stakeholders appreciated a lot. My biggest project, although personal, was a website that would automatically collect covid related data and make predictions on how it will evolve. It was quite a big thing in my country and at one point I had more than 5M views daily. It was entirely a hobby project that went viral, but I learned a lot from it and this is what made me interested in actual data science.
About two years ago, before I joined the company, they started building a Data Science team. They hired a Fortune 500 Data Scientist with a lot of experience under his belt, but not so much management experience. With the help of a more experienced manager, with no relation to Data Science, he had the objective to put together the team and start delivery. In about 6 months the team was ready. It was entirely PhD level. One year later the manager left and so did the team. It's hard for me to say what really happened. Management says they haven't delivered what they were supposed to, while the team was saying the expectations were too high. Probably the truth is somewhere in the middle. As soon as the manager resigned, they asked me directly if I want to build and lead the new team. I was somehow "famous" because of the covid website. There was also a big raise involved which convinced me to bypass the impostor syndrome. Anyway, I am now leading a new team I put together.
