From the course: A Day In The Life of a Data Scientist

Being a good team member

From the course: A Day In The Life of a Data Scientist

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Being a good team member

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- A critical part about being a data scientist is working actually with the team and that means that you're not going to be working solo. If anything, you're going to be working with a pretty expensive team and that means really focus on those working relationships. That's going to pay dividends. We have a tendency to want to just work on a problem and just be in a cave and just solve that problem but in reality, in a working environment, the best way to solve problems is to work with your team. So when working with large teams, it can be a real challenge to translate your technical knowledge to nontechnical people. You can either try to tackle that on yourself or look to other team members who are really good at that and building those relationships with those other team members might be a really good success. Some companies have roles like system engineers, like myself, who that's really what we excel and shine at. We try to translate your guys's awesome technical knowledge into something that other people can understand. Team building is really critical for everybody. It can be kind of a trope to do some team building activities, such like an escape room or something like that and ultimately, those are kind of fun and helpful, but the moments that the team really comes together is when we're presented with challenges and everybody shows up for that challenge. So identify those challenges that where everybody can surround and lead and present the team with them. That's going to really unify everybody together and create the relationships that's going to solve what you want. Peer review is really important to the success of any project. You don't want to get slowed down by it. You don't want to be limited by, "Hey, I need to wait for this thing to get reviewed," blah, blah, blah. But that said, the best work always comes out when everybody has at least a time to get a quick glance at either at your branch or your report that you wrote because getting different perspectives and different ideas at least will strengthen the work that you do.

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