Solving the lonely data scientist problem

There is a well documented problem across statisticians, data scientists, and data analysts. Whether they are an isolated data scientist or are embedded on a team of statisticians, they tend to do their work alone. Even if your team is using git and GitHub, it doesn’t mean that people are reading each other’s code.

The longer that I worked as a statistician on research teams, the more I became convinced that code review should be a key component of this job and would solve the problem of working in isolation. How else would I grow and if I wasn’t looking at others’ work and having someone review mine? If you are a writer or editor, one of the key ways you get better at your craft is by reading widely and sharing drafts. I started advocating for a code review system in my group. However, each time I tried to implement this practice it felt like it never really stuck.