When hiring data scientists, there’s nothing more frustrating than making the wrong hire. Data scientists are in notoriously high demand, hard to attract, and command large salaries — compounding the cost of a mistake. At The Data Incubator, we’ve talked to dozens of employers looking to hire data scientists from our training program, from large corporates like Pfizer and JPMorgan Chase to smaller tech startups like Foursquare and Upstart. Employers that didn’t have good hiring experiences in the past often failed to ask a key question: