On my team at work, I seem to talk endlessly about the importance of “data correctness” 1 . We data practitioners typically focus on building things. We write code, model data, build dashboards, formulate regressions, and develop machine learning models. We are happy when code compiles and unhappy when it doesn’t. When everything works, we move on. There’s always the next data set, the next…
We begin with a melody by Gary Provost: This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a…
As individuals are hired into an organization, they are typically screened first and foremost for “hard skills”. If you’re an engineer, do you know how to code, architect a system, or evaluate the tradeoffs of any particular implementation? If a financial analyst, do you know how to build a discounted cash flow model, or reconcile income statements to cash flows? Hard skills compose the tactile…
Several years ago I took a break from the corporate world to work on a startup idea. In the beginning, I was intoxicated by the idea, molding and permutating and tinkering with it every which way. I ideated on its design, its architecture, its business model, its market opportunity. I incubated the idea from dawn until dusk, like a mother hen enveloping her infants under the warmth of her…
Several years ago, I was working on a dashboard of platform usage statistics to be presented to the executive team. I had spent a few days on it, sourcing the data, building out calculations, adjusting its layout and design. Hours before the presentation, I sent it to my manager for final review.
A few years ago I came across a great word called “perseveration”.
Why is culture so hard to preserve as an organization scales? Culture is the set of beliefs and practices that belong to a particular group of people - in this case, the group of people who work at the firm. The initial culture is woven by the founders, stitched together by what they say and what they do. Among small groups of people, say up to 10, a single, coherent culture can persist without…
One skill I always try to practice on the job is to walk through walls. Walls, in the metaphorical sense, could be explicit prohibitions, such as “thou shalt not do that”. They could be organizational walls, like “that team or committee is responsible, so they will take care of it.” Or technical walls, such as “we don’t know how to do that” or “we don’t have access to that system”. Or economic…
When I think of one of the many “productivity boosters” we as workers have at our disposal, delegating tasks ranks near the top of the list. Other forms of leverage exist, such as writing code to automate complex workflows, but at the end of the day you still need a person to build and use the tools. If someone doesn’t know what problem to work on or who to go for information, it doesn’t matter…
When we think of data, we typically think of structured data. Data which fits cleanly into a data table, neatly organized into rows and columns. Data which is readily amenable to calculating totals, averages and distinct counts. Data which is easy to summarize and, in turn, understand. We don’t typically think of unstructured data: text, images, videos, PDFs and other proprietary formats, which…