For me the world is divided into two kinds of people – math lovers and math haters. The growing tribe of data scientists belong to the former. Number crunchers, they love to make sense out of terabytes of data which could be of any kind — call data, poll data, TV viewership, customer data and so on.
"The data is recorded differently, has different patterns and tendencies and it is too much for you to just look at it and come to conclusions. This ability to make sense of data to derive insights is the job of a Data Scientist. These wizards find patterns in data and reduce it to its most significant points. They have made an impact in places such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Walmart etc. It is not surprising that the Harvard Business Review named it the Sexiest Job of the 21st Century in 2012,” says Saurav Ghosh, a decision scientist with Mu Sigma, a Bengaluru-based data analytics company.
That was in 2012, you would say but the momentum sustained and in 2016, Glassdoor, a networking platform, called it the best job of this year. “All e-commerce companies need to understand and interpret data to improve their ability to do business. Given the explosion of e-commerce and other similar industries in India, it is only natural that Data Sciences is experiencing such high demand. Industry averages on compensation are hard to come by. At our company, we fix compensation during the initial learning phase (over the first three years) at 21 lakhs. After this, salary growth is based on actual performance and value creation but generally is competitive with MBA graduate salaries,” states Saurav.
Raam Nayakar, senior manager of marketing analytics and strategy at fashion e-retailer Myntra echoes Saurav’s beliefs. “When you enter our office, you will find a long list of values there. One of them is that data drives efficiency,” points out Raam.
Data science, the senior professional, says has evolved from decision science which has existed from years. “Data is everywhere. We all subconsciously apply it to different spheres of life. I personally apply it to how to reach home quickly as to what route to take, while shopping etc. But the whole sexiness got attached to it only after Harvard Business Review called it the sexiest job of the century.”
Business schools have not remained indifferent to this boom and that’s how in the last few years IIM Kolkata, Bengaluru, and Lucknow and Indian School of Business have come up with courses in business analytics. And Then there are several online vendors like DataCamp which offers to train you in various tools like R, Python, SAS and others.
While a lot of us would like to believe that majority of data scientists possess engineering backgrounds, Atanu Kundu, a former data scientist with MU Sigma says it is not always the case. Though he himself studied chemical engineering from BITS Pilani, Atanu has seen people with economics background do as well. “It is about understanding your business better in a more calculated manner. You use technology to understand the information through data. Mathematicians and statisticians also do very well. Engineers have an edge because they can streamline technology.”
Raam says a data scientist has a multi-disciplinary role. “He is a part-programmer, part-scientist, and one someone who is inclined towards maths and programming. He is someone who is passionate about numbers because it is just so crazy to see these numbers and to be able to do something with it.”
Atanu no longer works at Mu Sigma. He has started his own venture “Hidden Closet”, a clothing rental company. A hands-on experience and exposure to data, it gave him tremendous confidence and an understanding of business. For his own business, he cites data as the most crucial element. “We come in by 11.30 a.m. :30 every day, we build models, capture meaningful data followed by mathematical calculations which is then applied in various ways.”
Today from Ola to Flipkart to Myntra, everyone is investing deeply in their data science teams. “Bengaluru angalore leads the pack in analytics and data science owing to its large entrepreneur base and the density of tech-based companies,” says Saurav.
