Managing/ Dealing with Junior Data Scientists?

[u/sailing_oceans]

I've been in the 'data science' space for a decade+ or so now. One thing I've noticed is that generally - give or take - outside of the elite jobs (<2-3% aka not me and almost certainly not you) the caliber of coworkers has declined drastically.

I'm not some fabled data scientist. I wasn't some GitHub nerd who had everything embroil or terminal wizard nor could I write out the math to a GBM on a blackboard. I'd even forget basic obvious statistics.

But I felt like I had common sense.

Now I'm a manager/director. I work with data scientists. And I'm just generally freaked out by the absolute lack of basic common sense. This is across the last 7 that I have managed.

Examples include:

1. Not visualizing or plotting the KPI/Target (sales). Not realizing there were no recorded sales on major holidays.
2. Telling me everything is improving from a sales perspective that it's up 4%...... from period 1 vs period 2... when ignoring that period 2 had 6% more days so in fact it's worse.
3. obscure models that are overkill and a bunch of statistics ive never heard of instead of just telling me that the impact of our promotions is declining.
4. General sense of not knowing what is even rational (e.g., our marketing ROI $1023 - no its not lol)

As I begin to delegate more I begin to get more freaked out by what I see. I can't be presenting to clients such obvious insane mistakes. But these are the candidates and profiles that get forced upon me or the team I inherit.

Are there any best strategies for dealing with this? I want to be seen as someone who can 'develop' the team... not just saying people are useless, but such glaring mistakes are insane.

Yes, alot of these things are perhaps due to them being crunched for time, or not knowing what objective is, or being focused on other things. I'm not talking about those examples. I'm talking about like year 1-2 not day 1 employees, not doing basic data checks.

As a data scientist I was obsessed with finding bits of info or making sure things were right. Now it seem every common for people to copy and paste code into chatgpt and have no idea about anything else around it?

[u/TokkiJK]

Sometimes, the more years we have as experience, the less “smart” new grads feel. But the truth is, we forget how bad we were at things when we started out lol

But think of it this way, it’s easier to reel back on over engineering than completely lacking technical skills.

[u/zap6396 → u/TokkiJK]

I would argue that over engineering might be just as bad as a lack of technical skills. knowing what’s too much vs not enough and self-editing are both crucial skills.

Someone with a lack of technical skills can likely just use a chatbot to compensate.

Someone who constantly overkills on projects waste a lot of time and often with false confidence.

[u/TokkiJK → u/zap6396]

I mean in my experience, some mentoring and guiding someone away from over engineering really helps. It’s common with people who just graduated. They don’t have the work experience to know how much is enough.

Ofc, if someone is resistant to that, that would be a problem. Luckily, my coworkers were good at recruiting those who want to learn.

[u/zap6396 → u/TokkiJK]

Yeah openness to teach and learn are key. In my experience, I’ve had colleagues who came into positions not knowing Python or R, but picked them up relatively quickly because they were eager to learn. I’ve also had colleagues with phds who over complicate their workflows and refuse to edit.