#124 The Data Science Team: Skills Needed, Purpose and How to Structure with Dan Costanza – Chief Data Scientist

Dan Costanza, Chief Data Scientist at Citi, joins me for the first episode in the new “Bitesize Insights for Data Driven Leaders” Series. Dan opens the show by explaining how he got interested in data. After graduating from college, Dan went into an investment banking role. Eventually, he received an exciting project that got him started down the data path. Dan says as someone who didn’t study computer science in school, it has been a heavy lift trying to get those technical skills up to par. During a code-heavy project, Dan needed to learn how to break up the project and work through it. Also, he learned how to think about sampling data without bias.

Then, Dan explains the importance of emotional intelligence for data science. Conscientiousness and emotional intelligence are the things that you can actually interview for. Instead of judging people on their grades, we need to judge people on their ethics, communication skills, and willingness to work in teams. In India, Dan set up a data science team. The talent in India is insane. However, there are cultural differences Dan needed to work through. For instance, he told his team that they needed to speak up when they had ideas. If you create space for people to bring their own thoughts, you’ll hear loads of good suggestions. Before Dan told his team that, they would withhold useful information.

Quotes:

“When you look at the hiring research again, like there are two real categories and the one is things you don’t interview for, which are the intellectual horsepower things and those are - how smart you are, do you have some specific skills I need. The word that always comes up on the other side is conscientiousness, and that encompasses the stuff we talked about at the beginning, and the emotional intelligence, teamwork parts of it and those are the things you do actually interview for. Which is counterintuitive for a lot of people who work in quanti type roles because you want to ask people really hard questions, to see if they are smart, but the problem is the data doesn’t support that as being predictive of anything when you control for their grades.”
“You start by spraying things around, working with a lot of people, just to get the volume in and see who those people are and meet people, and as you work a little bit, you start to understand their own types of workflow.”
“More powerful then compliant is having good ethics there on the ground.”

Read the full episode summary here: Episode #124

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