[g9yuayon]

I can attest how useful Bayesian analysis is. My team recently needed to sample from many millions of items to test their qualities. The question is that given a certain budget and expectation, what's the minimum or maximum number of items that we need to sample. There was an elegant solution to this problem.

What was surprising, though, was how reluctant the engineers are to learn such basic techniques. It's not like the math was hard. They all went through the first-year college math and I'm sure they did reasonably well.

[some_guy_nobel]

What were they reluctant to learn? Why do they need to learn it?

Plenty of engineers have to take an introductory stats course, but it's not clear why you'd want your engineers to learn bayesian statistics? I would be surprised if they could correctly interpret a p-value or regression coefficient, let alone one with interaction effects. (It'd be wholly useless if they could, fwiw).

It'd be nice if the statisticians/'data scientists' on my team learned their way around the CI/CD pipelines, understood kubernetes pods, and could write their own distributed training versions of their pytorch models, but division-of-labor is a thing for a reason, and I don't expect them to nor need them to.

[g9yuayon]

I guess I have a different philosophy: whoever owns the problem should learn everything necessary to solve the problem. In my case, the engineers showed no interests in learning the algorithm and the math behind it. For instance, when they built the dashboard for the testing, they omitted a few important columns and got the column names wrong. When I tested them on their understanding of the method, there was none. To say the least, my team should know enough to challenge me in case I made any mistake, or so I assume.

On a side note, I believe it is an individual's responsibility to find the coolness in their project. What's the fun of building a dashboard that I have done a thousand times? What's the fun of carrying out a routine that does not challenge me? But solving a problem in a most rigorous and generalized way? That is something in which an engineer can find some fun. Or maybe it's just me.