It’s been more than eight years since Facebook’s first data scientist told a Bloomberg reporter that “the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” By the time the data scientist, Jeff Hammerbacher, delivered that infamous criticism in 2011, he was already a few years removed from the data team at Facebook, where he had pored over enormous social data sets from 2006-2008.

He was recruited by Facebook at 23 years old, fresh out of Harvard University and riding an early wave of bright data scientists who brought complex data tools and techniques out of academia and into the private sector. Recently, TechRepublic reported that Facebook now employs more than 1,200 data workers (defined to include data scientists, data engineers, data architects, database administrators, machine learning experts, big data engineers and artificial intelligence specialists).

Source: forbes.com
Author: Ike Kavas