Jeff Leek over at Simply Statistics interviewed one of Google’s statisticians there a little while ago, Nick Chamandy. You’ll find the interview here. He had an interesting comment on describing what it is he did, and more to the point, ensuring more people got access to his kind of role by recognising that different field use different languages.
When posting job opportunities, we are cognizant that people from different academic fields tend to use different language, and we don’t want to miss out on a great candidate because he or she comes from a non-statistics background and doesn’t search for the right keyword. On my team alone, we have had successful “statisticians” with degrees in statistics, electrical engineering, econometrics, mathematics, computer science, and even physics. All are passionate about data and about tackling challenging inference problems.
I thought this was quite interesting because it represented a certain amount of out of the box thinking about what it is you want people to do. I can say this of course because I’m a language graduate working in IT – sometimes the talent isn’t roundly sorted by academia for you.
I think this tends to get forgotten now and again.