Hottest job? Data scientists say they're still mostly digital 'janitors'

Data scientists are considered to have the hottest job right now, but a new study suggests they're little more than "digital janitors" who spend most of their time cleaning data to prepare it for analysis. That's according to CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing company, which surveyed 80 data scientists with varying levels of experience. While an advanced degree is usually required for the position, a full 60 percent of respondents said they spend most of their time cleaning and organizing data, leaving little for analytical tasks like building training sets and refining algorithms. "You have your hardest-to-hire resource spending most of their time cleaning data," said Lukas Biewald, CrowdFlower's cofounder and CEO. Cleaning and organizing data, as it turns out, is also data scientists' least favorite part of the job, according to more than half of CrowdFlower's respondents.