The most difficult thing in data science: politics

When I was waking up at 6 AM to study Support Vector Machines I thought: "This is really tough! But, hey, at least I will become very valuable for my future employer!". If I could get the DeLorean, I would go back in time and call "Bulls**t!" on myself. The truth is that reality is much more nuanced, and the fact the field is still far away from being mature isn't helping at all. The classical story goes something like this: "data scientists spend 80% of their time getting, cleaning and managing data, only the rest is spent on analysis and machine learning".