You'll have to do better than an ad hominem + "the opposite is true." Author is Chief Algorithms Officer at Stitchfix and former VP Data Science & Engineering at Netflix.
No, sorry. Argument from authority doesn’t mean the original article has a cogent point.
There’s no burden on anyone to refute anything from this piece, as the piece itself has not met any basic requirement of presenting facts or evidence in the first place.
It’s merely a matter of fact to point out this deficiency of the article. The premises of the article could still be accurate (though I think that is fleetingly unlikely), but even if so, this article does not justify any of those claims, so nobody could know one way or the other from this article. Again, this is just a matter of observation of the justifications given.
This author would personally find it more convenient if the skillset of data scientists and data platform engineers coexisted in one person who also happened to have the drive to undertake employment spanning all those skill sets, and wouldn’t become unhappy if the employer did not respect specializations. So this author has decided to read tea leaves out of economic principles and superimpose this wish as if it was justified by some first principles analysis.
In fact, this wishful thinking seems exactly in line with the flawed perspective that executives or director level employees will have. They don’t want to have to care about motivation and intellectual curiosity required to keep certain kinds of knowledge workers happy & productive, and spend lots of time trying to justify how their business units embody corporate platitudes about customer-driven passion. It’s quite easy to see why they would fall victim to this sort of naive wishful thinking. It’s quite similar to CTOs getting suckered by turn-key consulting solutions. It’s not even surprising that VPs & C-suite executives would be very wrong about this type of work.
I like Ray Dalio's principle of "believability."[1] All else being equal, it's reasonable to weight an experienced person's input more than that of a less experienced person.[2]
