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Zestyclose-Check-751 t1_j4qcv02 wrote

Could someone explain how Data Scientists work as consulters?

I can imagine only a few cases:
* A company already has a DS team, but they are not deep enough in some domains and need help/consultation.
* The integration of the solution is simple enough and may be delivered as API.
* A company wants PoC / demo, after that they gonna hire someone to work on it.

But usually, DS needs insides into how business works and the integration of the solution may be really long-term, especially if it includes A/B tests, re-iterations over model training, datasets collection and so on. In this case, even onboarding may be long enough.

So, I'm wondering to hear about real cases that have been solved by consulters and how it generally may work.

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wildCatInMass t1_j4vv1tj wrote

As a consultant myself, I can say you're reasonably accurate with your assessment. Often times it works by a consulting firm beautifully presenting to non-technical execs at a company about how they can turn the company's data into money. Lots of over-confidence and some nicely "massaged" benchmark figures.

If said company hires the consulting firm, then the firm staffs the project with people who basically have to figure out how to build what was sold...typically in a short time, with a new team, none of whom understand the company's data landscape and the nuances associated with the company. You might be thinking that this is a recipe for disaster. You'd be right. It's why job satisfaction for data scientists and ML engineers in consulting is super low. But success stories do exist when the stars align and a team is able to build things like recommendation engines, supply chain optimization models, conduct a good segmentation analysis, etc. for companies that don't have sufficient talent to execute these internally.

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