FEBRUARY 10, 2023
Zerodha boss Nithin Kamath is known for not mincing words and sharing his thoughts upfront. In a recent LinkedIn post, the founder of one of India’s largest stock brokerage companies revealed that they don’t hire data scientists and the reason might be surprising.
According to Kamath, data scientists don’t give very “useful insights” and also because the Zerodha team doesn’t believe in upselling. Stating his own example, he said, “I did several experiments and noticed that whenever I produced analysis that was in line with what management expected – my analysis was praised and widely disseminated. Nobody would question data completeness, quality, whatever. They would pick some flashy metric like a percentage run around with it.”
He, however, pointed out that whenever his analysis contradicted the management’s interpretations, there would be a lot of “scrutiny” around data quality, numbers, etc. Moreover, even after clarifying all their doubts, his analysis would be “tossed away as non-actionable/useless, etc.”
Kamath’s conclusion was that if one wants to succeed as a data scientist, he or she needs to provide analyzed data in a fashion which supports management’s ideas, “however wrong or ineffective they might be.”
“Data scientist’s job…,” he concluded, “is to launder management’s intuition using quantitative methods.”
Kamath himself dabbled in a couple of jobs before launching his company.
In his personal blog, he once revealed how he was a below-average student academically. It was his love for trading, which he discovered at the age of 17, that brought his life on track and brought him closer to his calling in life. “I’ve been through the boom and bust journey every good trader experiences. In the early 2000s, I borrowed money and blew up my trading account and then worked in a call center for 4 years trying to make up for the debt, while also trading on the side,” he wrote in the blog.
He quit the call center job once a person hired him to manage his portfolio. Consequently, as his experience and network in the industry grew, he launched Zerodha in 2010 along with his brother Nikhil Kamath.
Courtesy/Source: Business Today
