Sexy Statisticians

No, really...keep reading...

I met a guy last week who told me he was going to work for google. I thought that google didn't have a handle on how analytics can improve marketing both on and offline and were hiring adsales people. Who wants to go and sell search services to media agencies? We get it.

He told me that The McKinsey Quarterly published an interview with chief economist Hal Varian. I urge you to read it after the jump

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Hal_Varian_on_how_the_Web_challenges_managers_2286

What I love about it is this quote:

"I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it."

Looks like they do get it and we can stop pretending we are architects now?