Pluspunten
- I have some great coworkers who work here. - There are plentiful snacks and free food that circulate throughout the week. - There are a ton of cool, expensive furnishings here from Restoration Hardware or other hipster places. Definitely some interesting pieces to look at. - DataScience is mostly funded by Saudi money, and so the company is above market with compensation. The reason I mention the source of the money is because I felt misled by the reputable VCs (Greycroft, Crosscut) touted on the DataScience website, but invested a relatively minimal portion of this company's total funding. I would have done more of my own due diligence on the company had I known this, and would likely not have taken a job here.
Minpunten
DataScience, Inc. is now on its fifth or so major pivot, with its most recent in 2016. The number of pivots in and of itself aren't necessarily a problem, but they seem to have come from an ongoing lack of understanding of the industry, a general lack of business acumen, and the founders' inability to make difficult decisions in concert with a penchant for sweeping bad news and negative feedback under the rug, no matter how much truth is in them. Leadership settled on another new direction late last year, but the new space is crowded with competitors that have multiple years of development lead time on DataScience, or are better, cheaper open-source alternatives. DataScience has just gotten started, and it seems like we are going to try and win primarily through marketing. I am skeptical that it will be effective given the highly priced, enterprise model that we need to pursue and the highly technical user base that we'd have to sell to. The platform we're working on is essentially a repackaged set of other tools that do it much better - Domino Data Labs, Mode Analytics / Looker, Jupyter / iPython notebooks. Another unfortunate development here has been the rise of politics as a major driver of decisions. I have seen colleagues get left out of meetings, isolated, or even laid off with little to no warning because they disagree with product leadership. On the other hand, the product team has ballooned to an unnecessarily large number for a company as small as ours. There is definitely a boy's club feeling here, which feels antithetical to a company with such a collegial and intellectual name. There was an ugly period recently when a lot of people were laid off or left, many of them senior data scientists; the fact is, there is no need for many actual data scientists to be here anymore. The company used to be centered on data scientists providing consultation and building models to solve problems, but that business model has failed and shut down. That transition was awkward and poorly handled, and covered employees with a prolonged cloud of fear and uncertainty. To summarize, the future feels uncertain, the company strategy feels reactive and ill-conceived, you will have to be politically savvy here and have your head on a swivel, and if you're a data scientist, perhaps look elsewhere as there are a lot of other compelling places to go and problems to solve. There was a point where this company felt like it was on the edge of something exciting, but that time has come and gone. Now it feels like we're in the midst of a final, desperate hail mary. Join at your own risk.