Building the right team
AA: When you’re hiring and building a team of data scientists and engineers, what do you normally look for in terms of their technical skills and their attitudes? What is it when you’re interviewing someone that makes you think, “Yes, I want them on my team?”
SD: There’s no perfect recipe. Everyone’s different.
One of the things I look for is intelligent people, and intelligence is about joining the dots.
You might be faced with somebody who is hypertechnical, which is useful, but then if that hypertechnicality is not linked to appropriate solutions or something that is practicable or will work in a production system, all of that potential is not going to flourish when put in a team.
Part of it is about how rich your life is in general. I find that obviously, businesses take up a lot of time and involve working long hours, but that doesn’t shouldn’t mean that you don’t have side projects...