Previous employer did something similar. Hired a crazy expensive data scientist, spent truckloads of money on a data swamp, er, lake, and then didn’t really have any goals for what to do with all that capacity.

The new hire got lucky, as there was some low hanging fruit (optimizations we all knew about). The obvious solution was implemented and then he ex post facto claimed 100% credit for the revenue enhancement. Since it’s like 10x his salary every year he’s pretty much on autopilot.

So you all knew about optimizations 10x a data scientist salary, but didn't act on them?

Actually good that the company hired him then.

> So you all knew about optimizations 10x a data scientist salary, but didn't act on them?

Sadly, most engineers aren't allowed to pursue that kind of stuff. Normal dev jobs can be stifling.

If you walk into your CEOs office today and say "I can increase revenue from our site by 1 million dollars" (#) you will get a hearing. If three devs on that site do it, with a poc they will get the chance to do it 95% of the time.

But the CEO who hires a data scientist is explicitly asking that person to walk into their office and say "I can increase revenue by X" - that is their job. The website dev does not have that job.

And there are two views on this problem - the CEO did the right thing by hiring someone to explicitly optimise the site - there are improvements to be made, create the right organisation so that those improvements flow to company.

Or there is the other argument, that the organisation is stifling innovation from below, and that the CEO should have been actively soliciting improvements from dev team and elsewhere

Generally both are right

Not this place. Our department produced multiple designs and products that had substantial positive revenue. We even did some ML projects with our existing team and/or SaaS products. Anything that didn't come from the head office was treated as a rogue experiment.

That's why you have management to listen, decide direction and argue about it. Seems like engineering management wasn't doing it's job so someone hired a Data Scientist outside their hierarchy to actually get things done.

Yeah I thought this exactly. If he had any brains he’d negotiate with management a 5x bonus for solving it, tied to achieving the 10x optimisations

I did this several times in my early career and was paid a lot and it was win/win

You have to phrase it carefully, but if you phrase it as a win/win with no risk, they’ll sign off on it

I had a similar situation, but it didn't go through. I offered to reduce the company-wide monthly costs by 5% in exchange for 40k once by replacing an outside vendor with my own self-developed clone which the company would then own. Didn't go through because our investors feared an increased dependency on me as an employee.

funny how in any other type of relationship that increased dependency would be considered a strength and not a risk

Especially with investors, the incentives might be that you're better off doing exactly what was asked for i instead of going rouge to boost the company's profits. For you, the developer, that's an unnecessary risk and there's no reward for taking it.

That kind of ignores power structures. Higher ups seem to be more willing to listen to external peope than internal ones. Plus, why should they pay you more for doing "your job"? Compared to a super expensive external guy who's hiring needs to be justified.

What exactly are you talking about?

Yeah my fairly small non-profit recently hired someone with a math degree to do stats and "big data analysis." We are talking about a company with <100,000 total "market."

In my experience, to these people, big data means "the excels look really big."