Working as a model developer, I have realized that the biggest interest conflict between a model developer and a business manager is how complicate the model ends up being. A model developer, on one hand, would like to develop a powerful model, which can perform its task, prediction, in accurate way. A business manager, on the other hand, would try to avoid over-complicate model being used in his business.
This is common to explain. It is the business manager who ends up using the model and he has to interpret the outcome from the model. And since a business manager tend to be not very technical, he doesn’t want to get into the trouble of interpret something that he doesn’t fully understand. But this is not a problem from a model developer’s point of view. A developer is technically savvy enough to have the ball to use the complicate information and gets the max satisfaction of developing something powerful.
I believe the conflict is universal because the two sides have quite different standing ground. But a company appealing good developers is the company that has good managers who know technical stuff and have a tolerant bar higher than average ordinal companies. I believe in companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft, there are many managers who embrace fancy, complicate ideas and encourage developers to go to certain point of complication. On contrast, in some old companies with not much innovative atmosphere, managers can be very conservative.
If you are a good developer, always chasing fancy ideas, would like to indulge into complicate stuff and you find business managers are not very supportive, consider changing a place.
Until next time, happy modelling.
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