The Care and Feeding of Data Scientists

Chapter 4. Fear and Loathing in Data Science

Now that you’ve gone through all of this effort to recruit, interview, and hire a data science team and have structured that team for success, how do you make sure that they stay happy and stay with you?

We’d argue that one of the most crucial factors for retention is understanding a key psychological fact about data scientists: FOMO is a real phenomenon within data science. FOMO—or the fear of missing out—is that quintessential emotion of our social-media age, that anxious feeling in the pit of your stomach that you’re sure something more fun and cooler than what you’re currently doing is happening somewhere else out there in the world. In data science, it can take the following forms: “My company isn’t doing any cool machine learning projects right now.” “We don’t really have big data…we just have a MySQL database, but I hear everyone else is using Spark.” “We’re not even doing deep learning…or reinforcement learning…or GPU-accelerated Bayesian inference for time series modeling.” Or whatever the next big thing is.

Roughly 40% of data scientists say that challenging work and learning opportunities are their top two motivating factors for changing jobs. And in fields that are moving and changing at lightning pace, as data science and machine learning are, FOMO masks a real, valid fear at its core: “If I’m not learning at my job, I’m going to be left behind and soon I’ll be irrelevant.”

So how do you make sure that FOMO doesn’t lead ...