In this recent article, by Istvan Hajnal shares his own experiences as a manager of data scientists:

“I noticed...that data scientists, but also statisticians and some top coders, often have difficulties in accepting orders from managers who don’t have technical skills themselves. This does not mean that they would publicly disobey, but rather they would use some technical excuse to do whatever they wanted to do, knowing very well that the manager didn’t have the technical knowledge to challenge them. Coming from an IT and statistics background gave me(just enough) credibility to be taken seriously, and that gave me a head start compared to other managers.”

As data scientists we want to spend more of our time analysing problems and less time dealing with corporate politics. We all know there is a lot of distractions in the workplace that can keep you from working on data problems. When I was working as a data engineer, I often found it easier to stick to the technical side of data crunching than to worry about how my task would impact on the 4 quarterly targets.Unfortunately data science doesn’t happen in the confines of a computer but in association with the realities of the workplace. Data data scientists have to understand the data in context of the business.