COMPLETELY agree. In companies that don't have data as a core competency, "big data" ends up being this business buzzword thrown about because their data is too big for their current set of tools... whether it's R or even Excel or what not.
As a math/stats guy who picked up more programming along the way, I personally think it's MUCH easier to train a DB guy some business sense than it is for a a business analyst to have Hadoop drilled into them. Of course, the downsides of a coder without sufficient savvy are harder to detect than a numbers guy who can't make his program work, and therein lies your problem.
As a math/stats guy who picked up more programming along the way, I personally think it's MUCH easier to train a DB guy some business sense than it is for a a business analyst to have Hadoop drilled into them. Of course, the downsides of a coder without sufficient savvy are harder to detect than a numbers guy who can't make his program work, and therein lies your problem.