What it's like to have the best job in America right now

computer work

Data scientists have the best job in America, according to Glassdoor.

The field may be relatively new and occasionally vaguely defined, but one thing's for sure — it's also growing.

That's becaues, in the digital age, the amount of data available is only going to continue to grow exponentially. And we'll need data scientists to set up the systems required to glean insight from all that information.

"In a lot of these areas, we're still like a baby in the crib," Data Science Association founder and president Michael Walker told Business Insider. "We're still crawling. Maybe we're standing up. I don't even think we're walking or running yet."

Business Insider spoke with several people working in the field of data science to get a sense of what it's like to have the best job in America right now.

Here's what the data scientists had to say:

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Why data scientists have the best job

Looking at Glassdoor's rankings, it's not hard to see why data scientists came out on top.

The occupation boasts a $110,000 median base salary. And it's in high demand — with Glassdoor listing thousands of job openings at a time.

Other factors that went into Glassdoor's methodology to find the best jobs in America include overall job score and job satisfaction scores. Data scientists earned 4.4 out of 5 on job satisfaction and 4.8 out of 5 on overall job score.

“I enjoy seeing the final product. The result of our work and the result of our algorithms are often things that are really, really cool," Lotem Peled, head data scientist at sales intelligence platform Gong.io, told Business Insider.

What being a data scientist entails

Data science may be popular at the moment, but many of the data scientists Business Insider spoke with said the field is still somewhat vaguely defined.

"Data science is an activity more than it is a job title," Kevin Safford, lead data scientist at data management platform Umbel, told Business Insider. "To accomplish this activity, you usually need a team of people with a range of different backgrounds and expertise. No one person is going to be expert at all the underlying skills necessary for a successful data science initiative."

Data scientists tend to work with data analytics programs and algorithms to extract meaning from data, often using high performance computers to do so.

"What a real data scientist does is take data — it can be large, small, from a variety of sources — and interpret it for your client or your employer," Walker said.

But don't mistake data scientists for similarly named occupations, like data analysts and business analysts.

"I think a common component to understanding what data science is and how it's distinct from other similar kinds of professions is really, when thinking about it, to highlight and underline the word science," Safford said. "It's about applying the principles about the scientific method toward solving business problems."

A typical day

There's really no typical day in data science.

"You have to find your own style," Peled said. "You can be a person who drills down on a single project until you solve it, and only then you go back up for air. Or you can be the kind of person who runs from project to project and does things more horizontally."

Many of the data scientists Business Insider spoke with mentioned that their drive to solve problems often allows them to blur the lines between work and rest.

"I don't think I'm ever off," Ryan McCready, data science at web design company Venngage, told Business Insider. "It's no big deal to get pinged by one of my coworkers late at night and then jump into a piece of data. It's like, 'Oh, this is very cool, I'll jump into it.'"

One major task for all data scientists involves taking the time to find solid data sets and formulate appropriate scientific questions.

"We do spend a lot of time making sure we have good data — well-prepared data — so we get very good results from our algorithms," Adam Estrada, director of analytics solutions at space imagery vendor DigitalGlobe, told Business Insider.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider