Guillaume's Blog - Data Science

American Tech Sector is thriving and is now leading the US Great Recovery. On the other side of the ocean though, French Tech Entrepreneurs and Programmers are much less lucky. Far from being considered Tech Stars, they enjoy less success and fame, thus attracting less talent in a very promising industry. What's the driving force being this and how to tackle it? 1- French CTOs talk about Price, not Value ... While discussing with a former French CTO, he asserted that French companies overwhelmingly favor quantity over quality, thinking that a larger workforce will lead to more productivity. In a nutshell, software development is deemed a commodity in France : One just need to find the lowest price. This is erroneous for the following reasons:  In Tech, it is very common to have Star Programmers that can achieve 5-10X more productivity than average [ Steve Jobs evaluated this ratio to 25X ]. Here is a quote from Paul Graham  to illustrate the point: I remember watching w

Physical Site Location is an interesting Analytics problem that many face: from Grocery Stores to Telcom and Apparel Retailers ...  One may run BI (Find Look-alike stores, Find performance Headroom) or play an  Expansion scenario (Find best location for a next store).   However, some problems do not fit into a boilerplate solution and require some ad-hoc analysis. Today, I will talk about a little simulation I ran that looks at 2 non-conventional scenarios. Background: Let's assume that the client is a major maintenance provider that has decided to enter the French Market to service 2,000 "client sites" and commissioned your company to optimize the location of its sites with 2 scenarios: 1-  Organic : Starting from scratch, which locations are best at optimizing the travel distance to the client sites? How many maintenance sites are required and what would be the workload of each? 2-  Acquisition:  Given the existing site network of a potential acquisitio