Book review: Data Scientists at Work

Second book that I read this vacation is Data Scientists at Work by Sebastian Gutierrez published by Apress. I have read other books in the "at work" series so I was familiar with the concept. This is a book that consist of 16 interviews with data scientists about their work and how they moved into the space.

The author is an individual that have a lot of background in the area himself having started 3 companies in the data analysis space. The table of contents looks like this:

Chapter 1: Chris Wiggins, The New York Times
Chapter 2: Caitlin Smallwood, Netflix
Chapter 3: Yann LeCun, Facebook
Chapter 4: Erin Shellman, Nordstrom
Chapter 5: Daniel Tunkelang, LinkedIn
Chapter 6: John Foreman, MailChimp
Chapter 7: Roger Ehrenberg, IA Ventures
Chapter 8: Claudia Perlich, Dstillery
Chapter 9: Jonathan Lenaghan, PlaceIQ
Chapter 11: André Karpištšenko, Planet OS
Chapter 12: Amy Heineike, Quid
Chapter 13: Victor Hu, Next Big Sound
Chapter 14: Kira Radinsky, SalesPredict
Chapter 15: Eric Jonas, Neuroscience Research
Chapter 16: Jake Porway, DataKind

The interviews follow the same pattern with open ended questions on who the person are, the company they represent what they do and what tools they use. Rarely there is any follow-up questions asked.

What I thought of the book

I found the book a bit long, and sometimes tedious to read. In my opinion the most interesting part to be what reading and resources they recommended. I also found some of the questions really strange like what was the first data set they worked on, why is that an interesting question to me at least that has not been life changing. Sometimes I gott a bit frustrated that there are no follow-up questions, rarely the question why is used, it is always about the what and how. The people interviewed are well selected and interesting but after reading the book I cannot wonder how the book would have turned out if the author would have been an experienced journalist sine doing good interviews is extremely hard.

Who I think should read it

Someone with interest in the start-up community in US. You also should not be annoyed with the fact that the book sometimes feels like reading a who-is-who in data science in Silicon Valley and New York, both the interviewees and the interviewer are guilty of name dropping.

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 31, 2014
  Simon, I'm one of the people interviewed in the book. Glad you took the time to read and review it, though sorry you found the format a bit frustrating. But why not take the opportunity to ask some follow-up questions of your own? I'm happy to try to answer them, and hopefully some of the other folks interviewed in the book will find their way to this page.