Data. Piles and piles of 1's and 0's. Big companies (you know the names, they start with letters like "G", "M", "A", "F"), all sifting through the 1's and 0's, looking for something, looking for answers, looking to see into the future or maybe just hoping to solve a puzzle. I've found myself taking a turn in that direction in my career.
At my last job, my main responsibility was that I took care of our departmental servers. A lot of people enter IT through help desk jobs, mostly helping people over the phone. An easy next step might be a more advanced help desk job, where you deal with things that stump the people who answer the phones first. Another next step is to start working with servers, which is where I ended up when the main server guy left our group. I took care of our department's servers for the past 4 or 5 years - about 30 or so of them at the time that I left. I'm a technology guy, so I enjoyed the job, but because servers 'serve' groups of people, a server having problems affects a lot of people and requires a quick response, even if it's 3am or on a weekend.
Toward the end of the job, I was a bit worn out by constantly having to be available, a sort of "on-call" status that never ended. The next step up, moving into a management job wouldn't have really change that, along with the fact that I'm happy being in technology, not managing others who are in technology. A few years back, I did the night-school thing and got a Master Degree in Information Systems, and in deciding to move out west, wondered if I might be able to find a job more in line with that degree. A friend who used to be my boss referred me to a job he'd heard about. It was a medical group that was trying to build a small IT group (a developer and a systems guy - the systems position was the open one) to deal with the quickly growing data needs for the department. I interviewed with them, and they offered me a job. I liked the people, and liked the potential for what I could learn there. So, I'm leaving the server admin world and moving into the world of data.
I've heard the phrase "Data Science" thrown around. For some, it's a new title for something that statisticians and mathematicians have been doing for a long time, long before computers entered the picture. All that's changed is the amount of data, not what people do to work with it. For others, they see it as the new "cash cow", the new field where jobs and money are plentiful, where you work with and analyze data like it's never been done before in those big companies that start with letters like "G", "M", "A" and "F".
So, what is "Data Science", really? I think the two views may both be partly right. This is both an old and a new field. It's an old field, in that it is applying things like statistics, mathematics, social science, computer science, all to analyze the girth of data that is being created about people and what they do. The amount of data has changed, but the "sciences" have not. But it may also be a new field, in the sense that instead of statisticians, mathematicians, etc., being consulted to do the work, along with their normal duties, this is a full-time gig due to the amount of data being generated and collected. From what I can tell, "Data Science" is an umbrella term that covers a group of disciplines - a 'new' combination of 'old' disciplines for dealing with epic amounts of data.
If you survey people that are in or pursuing this field, you find a good number of people with statistics backgrounds, but you also find mathematicians, computer science people, and researchers from a wide range of fields. I happen to be from the Computer Science world, with experience with servers, databases, and some programming experience. I'm not much of a math guy, nor a statistics guy, so those will be my areas to learn and grow in.
More to follow.
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