At startups, it’s not uncommon to be asked to wear a hat or two — or seven. Young, lean companies need all hands on deck, ready and willing to tackle problems as they arise.
As a result, employees are sometimes asked to work on projects discernibly outside of their wheelhouse. It’s not always ideal, but it’s part of the gig, right?
Not necessarily so at
, a local data science consulting firm with a team of about 10. As part of their onboarding process, Datascope employees are encouraged to choose a three-months-long project — on a topic of their choosing.
Of course, that’s in addition to getting fully ramped with client work and introducing new hires to the company’s culture and organization. But it’s safe to say it’s uncommon at best to grant newbies so much agency and trust.
“We pick a passion project where you can apply data science or coding or other technology skills — anything that you can sink your teeth into and have fun with,” said Michael Moliterno, a data scientist who’s been with the company about three months.
Moliterno, a fantasy baseball fanatic, chose to dive deep into the untapped data oceans provided by ESPN’s public leagues. He ended up building a program to dig through data from about 150,000 fantasy leagues over past four or five years, on the prowl for insights into how fantasy baseball is evolving.
“I was super interested in what the crowd was doing,” he said. “There are always guidelines and cheat sheets — this person’s going to be a sleeper or this person’s going to break out — and lots of rules of thumb around when you should draft or how much you should charge for a pitcher. But I wanted to look at what was actually happening.”
Moliterno's findings an analysis have since been published in a company blog post. Key takeaways include a decline in full-season leagues, and a rise of points-based leagues (influenced in part, Moliterno postulated, by the popularization of fantasy football, which commonly leans on points-based leagues).
Moliterno said the project was an exceptional way to get to know both the company’s culture and team members, who were always willing to drop what they were doing for an impromptu brainstorming session.
What’s more, the project acts as an opportunity for new hires to start ramping up on technical skills that may need a bit of sharpening.
Those three months are an opportunity to start ramping up on Python, he said, or to learn about Datascope’s data visualization solutions, different database options and kinks that might arise during client work.
Because of the company’s onboarding process, Moliterno said he “felt ready to hit the ground running."
And while researching fantasy baseball is by no means helping Datascope’s bottom line, Moliterno said letting employees explore their passion has manifest value yet.
“It’s cool to see, loud and clear, that they care,” he said. “They’re invested in you totally. If you want to spend three months investigating fantasy baseball, that’s great. There's no judgement there.”
Photo via Datascope Analytics.
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