Transcript: DBTB INT Josh Wills r

my name is Josh wills I work at slack and my title is director of data engineering oh I think like just the sheer diversity of topics and stuff like that they get covered at this conference over several days is the most exciting part for me I just love being able to be a fly on the wall and hear about stuff I know very very little about from people who know tons and tons and tons about it so yeah that's it's like a the mega conference aspect is my favorite part yeah ah because of money primarily like I think between Google and Facebook and other folks having built like defensible insanely valuable businesses that are fundamentally based on having access to data very cool interesting data that other people don't have access to like like most sort of cool things in the world that kind of fundamentally comes down to money and that's true for data as well I want to learn i think that data engineering and data infrastructure is horrible and then it's horrible for everyone they aren't alone in sort of their horror it's just it's hard it's hard and it's terrible for everyone but it doesn't mean it's not worth doing and doing the best of your ability within the constraints of the aforementioned horribleness so yeah ooh key vice on how to become a data scientist time to become a really great one I think the lake the I think being a great generalist is a great way to be a great data scientist I don't I've done like the highest level machine learning models and I've done like the lowest level sort of DevOps stuff in my career like even down to like debugging hardware in some situations yeah I don't I don't think there's like it's one is like weird sort of Zen koan kind of things like you can't become a data scientist by be trying to become a data scientist you have to get good at a lot of different things and then basically sort of insert yourself into a position where you can do data science like there's this great quote by a mathematician mathematics is what mathematicians do data science is what data signs do it's that's I don't know or it's stupid is as stupid does would be the sort of modern-day equivalent of that I think so i think i don't know i think there's too much effort on he like people trying to become data signed as opposed to just try and become lots good at lots and lots of different things that if you can do all those things software engineering ops statistics data analysis stuff means that you can become a data scientist so yeah anyway sorry that's in terms of being a great one i think if you employ that sort of breath strategy i think that is the way to become a great data scientist is have the breath be able to see the patterns be able to understand how things interact the different layers of the stack that is to me that is the path to greatness you