Data Scientists Thoughts that Inspired Me

Caitlin SmallwoodVP of Science and Algorithms at Netflix

From Interview for “Data Scientists at Work” book (2014)

Discovering things about people through their data was a really a cool thing

The data speaks for itself. That’s the easiest measure of success

It’s very obvious how different people are

People’s intuition is wrong so often, even when you’re an expert in an area

You should always have more questions than answers

You should never quite feel satisfied with an answer

Our closest reliable measure of customer satisfaction is customer retention

Mix of algorithms is almost always better than one single algorithm

The top things for people in hiring are hunger and insatiable curiosity

You imagine a data set & you salivate at just thinking about that data set

Thanks

© Happy Data Scientist, 2015

Sebastian GutierrezAuthor of “Data Scientists at Work” book