Analyzing the Analyzers

Appendix A. Survey Details

Design and Invitation

The survey was created on KwikSurveys.com (note: hacked, closed, and reopened under new management since we used it). The first page described the survey, stated our privacy policy, and thanked participants. The second page posed the skills-sorting task. The third page asked about education and experiences. The fourth page asked about professional web presence. The fifth page asked about self-identification and had some basic demographic questions. The final page thanked the participant and provided a link to send to others.

After testing, we posted links on social and professional networking sites, emailed friends and colleagues, and so forth. A sample personal invitation was:

As someone in the broad Analytics / Data Science / Big Data / Applied Stats / Machine Learning space, would you be willing to take a brief survey? Three of us in the DC Data Science community wondered about the ways that skills and experiences of practitioners in these fields vary, and are collecting some data to help us learn more. By participating, you would help us define these new fields better, and we hope the results will help people such as yourself talk about how your skills and your work fit in with everyone else’s. Should take 10 minutes or less!

Skills List

Here are the list of skills we provided (in random order) and asked respondents to sort:

• Algorithms (ex: computational complexity, CS theory)
• Back-End Programming (ex: JAVA/Rails/Objective C)
• Bayesian/Monte-Carlo ...