Always ask for more than what’s initially offered. I recently read an X post from a CEO of a healthcare startup about how she considered giving a candidate 2.5X the offered comp just because he ASKED for it. How can an average job seeker accomplish the same feat? Now, keep in mind, this startup raised $5.8M in Seed funding in 2021 and $20M in Series A funding in 2022…for a total of $25.8M raised. In other words, they got investments during the “easy money” times so they had a boatload of cash to burn. Any company or startup in this present day economic climate wouldn’t even consider this as a ..read more

Looking for a career change in 2024? For those working as Data Scientists, we have breaking news: you are all AI Engineers now. LinkedIn recently released their report on the top 25 fastest growing jobs in the US. LinkedIn’s Editor-In-Chief even did an interview about it on the Today Show. In the interview, he showed: 1⃣ Number 8 and Number 10 on the list are Artificial Intelligence Consultant and AI Engineer 2⃣ $200K+ Yearly Salary (although that depends on what city you live in and how many years of experience you have) 3⃣ 50% of AI Consultant and AI Engineer p ..read more

Happy New Year 2024! Just recently, financial uncertainty has led to many layoffs in tech, including in data science and analytics. In 2023, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Spotify (among others) all laid off data scientists and data analysts despite the profession being called “the sexiest job of the 21st century.” In 2018, I correctly predicted that even though there was strong demand for data professionals, eventually CEOs and senior executives will question their investments in data science and AI and want an ROI on the high six-figure salaries. I also said back then that it would happen by 2 ..read more

Why Attention To Detail Is An Important Trait Many years ago when I lived in Las Vegas, I was walking inside the Miracle Mile Shops at the Planet Hollywood, Las Vegas and passed by a Ben Sherman store. Towards the back of the store, nearby the sales counter, there was a quote display on the wall that said: Effortless cool is a detailed process. -Ben Sherman That quote stuck with me to this day. It’s a powerful quote that describes how most things that appear easy and effortless actually took a lot of work and detail to get to that level. Most people don’t know that attention to detail is o ..read more

Data Scientists and Analysts are starting to overflow their cups with mostly non-value added work at the request of stakeholders. And many don’t have the courage or confidence to say “No” to that. This also applies to many working and business professionals in other verticals and professions. Put simply, you need to build confidence, stop being a wimp, and start saying “No” to pointless work. Data Scientists can become the new decision-makers at companies and should be picking their own value-added projects When a company hires a data science team, the customers of that team are typically non ..read more

The purpose of this analysis is to create a quick and dirty forecast of the CCI30 Crypto Currency Index, using only a few lines of R code and easy-to-use and accurate time series forecasting models. The CCI30 Crypto Currency Index https://cci30.com/ “…is a rules-based index designed to objectively measure the overall growth, daily and long-term movement of the blockchain sector. It does so by tracking the 30 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. It serves as a tool for passive investors to participate in this asset class, and as an industry benchmark for investment managers.“ Th ..read more

The modern business world is captivated by data science and analytics. It seems like in almost every enterprise there is talk of needing to bulk up the data science and analytics functions to solve all conceivable business problems and chart the company towards endless success. In more cash-rich operations, management often seeks to go even beyond analytics and towards vaunted ‘AI’ solutions, generally caught up in Silicon Valley hype and expecting the state of AI to be decades (or even centuries) beyond its actual current state. Whether their company is large or small, countless contemporary ..read more

Motivation I’ve read several studies and articles that claim Econometric models are still superior to machine learning when it comes to forecasting. In the article, “Statistical and Machine Learning forecasting methods: Concerns and ways forward”, the author mentions that, “After comparing the post-sample accuracy of popular ML methods with that of eight traditional statistical ones, we found that the former are dominated across both accuracy measures used and for all forecasting horizons examined.” In many business environments a data scientist is responsible for generating hundreds or t ..read more

Over 20% of Amazon’s North American retail revenue can be attributed to customers who first tried to buy the product at a local store but found it out-of-stock, according to IHL group (a global research and advisory firm specializing in technologies for retail and hospitality. In other words, many companies and local stores suck at forecasting. Accurate demand forecasts are necessary if you’re a retailer who has one of their competitors being Amazon. Want to lose business to Amazon? Then produce sh**ty demand forecasts. It is also actually one of the “low-hanging fruits” of a new data science ..read more

If you are having the following symptoms at your company when it comes to business KPI forecasting, then maybe you need to look at automated forecasting: Ugly Excel spreadsheets with multiple tabs and 2000s style pastel formatting Business unit managers, store managers, operations managers, sales teams, and finance teams who give convoluted and indirect answers to basic questions about their forecasting methodology Too much manual and human intervention giving “guard rails” to the forecasts with no documentation on why they were put in place Lack of data science or data analyst personnel to c ..read more