Experience performing comprehensive PR review is now a required skill for all data roles, from data engineer to data scientist. Your data team is prob

WANTED: PR Reviewers for dbt Data Project

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2024-04-30 09:30:02

Experience performing comprehensive PR review is now a required skill for all data roles, from data engineer to data scientist. Your data team is probably adopting software engineering practices like version control and formalized PR review but, there’s a twist, you’ve got to review the data, as well as the code.

I saw this post on LinkedIn recently by Nirmal Budhathoki, a senior Data Scientist at Microsoft, that discussed Git and PR review as ‘realistic’ skills that data scientists need to adopt:

…we came across a unique DS job (ad) that seems to be interesting and more realistic…It actually talks about GIT and PR reviews. This is one of the skills data scientists need to inherit from software engineering…

Nirmal really hit the nail on the head. Good PR review is taken for granted and, the truth is, having the ability to understand data impact caused by code change is a core skill for any role working in a data team regardless of if it’s explicitly mentioned in a job ad.

When reviewing a PR, think of ‘PR’ as meaning ‘Point of no Return’ — as the reviewer you’re the last checkpoint before code is merged and prod data is changed.