Eric Colson argues in favor of data science generalists rather than specialists:
But the goal of data science is not to execute. Rather, the goal is to learn and develop profound new business capabilities. Algorithmic products and services like recommendations systems, client engagement bandits, style preference classification, size matching, fashion design systems, logistics optimizers, seasonal trend detection, and more can’t be designed up-front. They need to be learned. There are no blueprints to follow; these are novel capabilities with inherent uncertainty. Coefficients, models, model types, hyper parameters, all the elements you’ll need must be learned through experimentation, trial and error, and iteration. With pins, the learning and design are done up-front, before you produce them. With data science, you learn as you go, not before you go.
In the pin factory, when learning comes first we do not expect, nor do we want, the workers to improvise on any aspect the product, except to produce it more efficiently. Organizing by function makes sense since task specialization leads to process efficiencies and production consistency (no variations in the end product).
I think this article captures the downside risk of specialization, but not the downside risks of generalization: some people simply aren’t very good at some things, leading to huge amounts of technical debt down the road or failing a project due to the lack of requisite knowledge or skills. To give a personal example, I have a generalist team, but I still control the data flows (at the very least doing thorough code reviews of any database changes), my application specialist controls app architecture, my statistician reviews algorithms, etc. I don’t claim that this is the best strategy, but a group of pure generalists will have their own set of problems too.
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