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Careers and data science

Then, I went on to the hedge fund Madison Tyler, now known as Virtu Financial, of the top high frequency trading firms in the world according to Wikipedia. I led a team at a firm did marketing consulting for 90% of
Fortune 100 CMOs and learned marketing modeling from some of the best people in the world in academic marketing. Math and programming made all of this possible. I managed a team of engineers and have now started my own company Acculation, which does data science, artificial intelligence consulting and software development among other things. So, I am a graduate of the Founders’ Institute startup accelerator. This not easy: 60% of the people in my program didn’t make it to through. It’s been compared to survivor.

I have interviewed hundreds of people at different companies and hedge funds and marketing and consulting group where I was hiring manager. I have been told in the past that over a hundred people were interviewed for a position that I was eventually selected for. I’m going to point out again that the important thing to understand is that businesses have business process. They hire people to fill those business process needs. They prefer people that can start right
away, but what they generally don’t do is hire people simply because they’re smart or have a specific college degree without reference to those pre-existing business needs. I’ll say a little bit more about now, and a little bit more at the end.

Careers: Book Recommendations on Why Industry Needs Data Science

So, I’m going to throw some books out at you. Thinking, Fast and Slow is a 2011 book by Daniel Kahneman. Its central thesis is that there’s an dichotomy between these two modes of thinking.

System I

What he called System I is the fast, instinctual, and emotional system. This is the process that makes
decisions when you’re in a hurry, when you’re being chased by a lion. It’s about making decisions from the seat of your pants because you’re being chased by a lion.

System II

System II is the slower, more deliberate, more logical system. People do not behave as predicted by classical economics.

Those of you who were economics majors, you know were brought up in this rational decision-making framework. The truth is organizations tend to behave rationally and there’s a lot of evolutionary pressure on organizations: the tribe, the
family, corporations, governments to behave rationally. Those organizations that do not behave rationally tend not to survive. Evolution does not work on individuals. At least for animals, it does not work on individuals. It works on the species or it works on groups. As a result, the evolutionary pressure to be rational was not applied at the individual level.

There is actually a lot of evolutionary pressure for individuals not to be rational. That evolutionary pressure was applied at the group level: on families, on tribes, and there’s a lot of evidence that individuals do not behave rationally. Individuals are loss adverse. They are more likely to act to avert a loss than to achieve a gain. Thinking slow: so, the scientific method is a form of thinking deliberately to find the truth. Is an outcome repeatable and reproducible, is it option falsifiable? It is the opposite of superstition.

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