"Data Scientist is now the hottest job title in Silicon Valley"

Jeff Hammerbacher

Said : Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media in a recent survey - The World's 7 Most Powerful Data Scientists - in Forbes. Out of these, two names include those who jointly coined the term 'Data Scientist' that has now become one of the jobs that is hot in demand in Silicon Valley today. 

"The success of companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix, not to mention Wall Street firms and industries from manufacturing to retail and healthcare, is increasingly driven by better tools for extracting meaning from very large quantities of data. "Data Scientist" is now the hottest job title in Silicon Valley," Tim said.

Jeff Hammerbacher, Chief Scientist, Cloudera and DJ Patil, VP of Product at RelateIQ coined the term "Data Scientist.” Now it’s Silicon Valley's hottest job title. These two built the first formal data science teams at Facebook and LinkedIn, respectively. Both of them are at # 2 in the list after Larry Page, CEO, Google.

DJ Patil

Jeff Hammerbacher : Prior to co-founding Cloudera, Jeff (@hackingdata) conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook. The Data team was responsible for inventing and building powerful data analysis applications on Hadoop. That system is the core data platform at Facebook for improving the user experience and driving revenue. Before he joined Facebook, Jeff worked as a quantitative analyst on Wall Street. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from Harvard University.

DJ Patil : Prior to joining RelateIQ, he was Greylock’s data scientist in residence. He joined Greylock from now defunct Color Labs where he was Chief Product Officer. He has also worked as head of data products, chief scientist, and chief security officer at LinkedIn. As LinkedIn’s Chief Security Officer he partnered with Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zynga and others to take on hackers, spammers and fraudsters, and worked at eBay as their Director of Strategy, Analytics, and Product.

Others in the O'Reilly list are :

#3 Sebastian Thrun, Professor, Stanford University and Peter Norvig, Data Scientist, Google
#4 Elizabeth Warren, Candidate, U.S. Senate (Massachusetts)
#5 Todd Park,  Chief Technology Officer of the United States 
#6 Alex "Sandy" Pentland, Professor, MIT
#7 Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt, Computer Scientists, Cornell University

The role of the data scientist has grown tremendously during the past few years thanks to the explosive growth of social media network on the web. It has now become the hot new role to fill in Silicon Valley. 

Today, data-mining experts and talent, especially those who can develop compelling products and experiences around massive amounts of data, are among the most desirable talent hires in the technology world, both at companies and VC firms. There is great demand for new emerging data-mining companies that expertise in application of complex algorithms to make the enterprise smarter. 

According to glassdoor.com - a leading website on which employees share their salary and job satisfaction - the median salary for the job title “Data Scientist” ranges from $115,000 to $125,000.