The Fifth Risk(34)

Thinking they would make use of his data skills, he went to work at the Department of Defense, where he expected to look for patterns in terrorist networks. But instead of sticking him at a computer, his new employer shipped him off to a couple of former Soviet republics, to track and understand the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons left behind by the Russians. “They tell me,‘We need you to go to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan,’ and I’m like,‘I’m a mathematician.’ That was the first question I asked:‘Why me?’ They said,‘Hey, you’re a doctor.’ And I said,‘I’m not that kind of doctor.’ And they said,‘Close enough, you’ll figure it out.’” After that, they sent him to Iraq, to help rebuild the school system. All of the work was interesting, and a lot of it useful, but it didn’t have much to do with his deep ambition. “People still didn’t really appreciate how you can use data to transform,” he said.

To his surprise, this was true even of people back home where he had grown up, in Silicon Valley, to which he soon returned. Even there he couldn’t get a job doing what he wanted to do with data. “I was just trying to figure out where I could be helpful,” he said. “Google passed on me. Yahoo! passed on me.” His mom knew someone at eBay and so he finally was hired the undignified way. At eBay he tried, and failed, to persuade his superiors to let him use the data on hand to find new ways to detect fraud.

At length he moved to a new, slow-growing company called LinkedIn, where job seekers posted their CVs and attempted to create their own little networks. His new bosses asked him to be Head of Analytics and Data Product Teams. There, for the first time, he found an audience receptive to his pitch. “The same tools you use to identify where bad guys are, you can do with job skills,” he said. “You can show people where skills cluster. Where they might belong in the economy. If you’re trained in the army in ordnance disposal, maybe you’d be good at mining.” The analytics he’d created at LinkedIn had done exactly that—prodded an army bomb expert to find work setting explosives in mines.

Along with much more: in the space of a few years, the interest in data analysis went from curiosity to fad. The fetish for data overran everything from political campaigns to the management of baseball teams. Inside LinkedIn, DJ presided over an explosion of job titles that described similar tasks: analyst, business analyst, data analyst, research sci. The people in human resources complained to him that the company had too many data-related job titles. The company was about to go public, and they wanted to clean up the organization chart. To that end DJ sat down with his counterpart at Facebook, who was dealing with the same problem. What could they call all these data people? “Data scientist,” his Facebook friend suggested. “We weren’t trying to create a new field or anything, just trying to get HR off our backs,” said DJ. He replaced the job titles for some openings with “data scientist.” To his surprise, the number of applicants for the jobs skyrocketed. “Data scientists” were what people wanted to be.

In the fall of 2014 someone from the White House called him. Obama was coming to San Francisco and wanted to meet with him. “He’d seen the power of data in his campaign,” said DJ, “and he knew there was a new opportunity to use it to transform the country.” When the White House asked him if he wanted to bring his wife to the meeting, DJ figured that Obama was looking for more than a conversation. Inside of eight years he’d gone from being a guy who couldn’t get a job in Silicon Valley to being a guy the president of the United States wanted to offer a job he couldn’t refuse. When Obama did ask DJ to move to Washington, it was DJ’s wife who responded. “How do we know if any of this will be of any use?” she asked. “If your husband is as good as everyone says he is, he’ll figure it out,” said Obama. Which of course made it even harder for DJ to refuse.

DJ went to Washington. His assignment was to figure out how to make better use of the data created by the U.S. government. His title: Chief Data Scientist of the United States. He’d be the first person to hold the job. He made his first call at the Department of Commerce, to meet with Penny Pritzker, the commerce secretary, and Kathy Sullivan, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They were pleased to see him but also a bit taken aback that he had come. “They seemed a little surprised I was there,” recalled DJ. “I said,‘I’m the data guy and you’re the data agency. This is where a huge amount of the data is.’ And they’re like,‘Yes, but how did you know?’”



Nobody understood what it did but, then, like so many United States government agencies, the Department of Commerce is seriously misnamed. It has almost nothing to do with commerce directly and is actually forbidden by law from engaging in business. But it runs the United States Census, the only real picture of who Americans are as a nation. It collects and makes sense of all the country’s economic statistics—without which the nation would have very little idea of how it was doing. Through the Patent and Trademark Office it tracks all the country’s inventions. It contains an obscure but wildly influential agency called the National Institute of Standards and Technology, stuffed with Nobel laureates, which does everything from setting the standards for construction materials to determining the definition of a “second” and of an “inch.” (It’s more complicated than you might think.) But of the roughly $9 billion spent each year by the Commerce Department, $5 billion goes to NOAA, and the bulk of that money is spent, one way or another, on figuring out the weather. Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress. “Commerce is one of the most misunderstood jobs in the cabinet, because everyone thinks it works with business,” says Rebecca Blank, a former acting commerce secretary in the Obama administration and now chancellor of the University of Wisconsin. “It produces public goods that are of value to business, but that’s different. Every secretary who comes in thinks Commerce does trade. But trade is maybe ten percent of what Commerce does—if that.” The Department of Commerce should really be called the Department of Information. Or maybe the Department of Data.