Unpopular Opinion – Data Scientists Should Be More End-to-End - KDnuggets

Recently, I came across a Reddit thread on the different roles in data science and machine learning: data scientist, decision scientist, product data scientist, data engineer, machine learning engineer, machine learning tooling engineer, AI architect, etc. It's difficult to be effective when the data science process (problem framing, data engineering, ML, deployment/maintenance) is split across different people. It leads to coordination overhead, diffusion of responsibility, and lack of a big picture view. IMHO, I believe data scientists can be more effective by being end-to-end. Here, I'll discuss the benefits and counter-arguments, how to become end-to-end, and the experiences of Stitch Fix and Netflix. I find these definitions to be more prescriptive than I prefer. Instead, I have a simple (and pragmatic) definition: An end-to-end data scientist can identify and solve problems with data to deliver value.