What Is a Data Scientist, Anyway?

The path to becoming a data scientist is not a clear one. Consider the data-science team at Alpine Data, a San Francisco software startup that helps companies analyze their data to make predictions about their businesses. It includes a former marketing manager, a former physicist, a former operations researcher and a former business consultant. Helping the team as well is a former mathematician who was hired as a software engineer. "We strongly believe that having people from different backgrounds collaborating around a problem is more important than selecting some fancy algorithms," says Alpine co-founder Steven Hillion.