I would like to hear more about my European fellows w.r.t. how GDPR affected their ability to muster domain knowledge.
I used to work for a small start-up and the CTO was very strict on data access, making my life as feature developer and "data scientist wanna be" almost impossible.
He, on the other hand, had not only access to all data but also used the product as a consumer (which didn't make sense for ICs so we ended just playing with sales demo accounts). I ended leaving the company because of that.
I’ve been in similar situation and it was really hard to be effective in product / high level planning meetings because it is easy to be blindsided. At the time, I was still an youn engineer in a big co, so I just thought it was my lack of technical experience, but in reality it was nothing technical to it but BS politics.
What boils down to is that people who have any extra data access privilege will have the lead.
Most of the insights will come from aggregate data, so I think companies could work around privacy concerns but I am no GDPR expert.
Back in my days in academia, there was a saying “if you have the trace, you have the paper”.
Enterprises seems to hire less data scientists actually, but they are trying to raise their employees' data skills.
I think that's the cause of the growth of self-analytics tools. Below are examples of them.
1. Metatron Discovery : https://metatron.app 2. Metabase : https://metabase.com/