"I think that it's a really exciting field," Cheng told Business Insider. "More and more companies are starting to realize the potential they have in their data. A data scientist who's answering questions for you, does their own delving in and being the detective.
"So, in Glassdoor's case, it could be building salary estimates, looking at how to return results for job search," Cheng said. "I think those are kind of the big areas. Insights, dashboards, and building products."
"With almost every project, as we start digging through the data, we find new directions to go to, or maybe we find things we didn't know we're there, or maybe the outcome was totally different from what we expected.
One of the more wel-known examples of someone who created their own project is Nate Silver, who started posting forecasts for the performance of MLB players for fun. He became more famous after predicting the individual state outcomes of 2008 Presidential election, Cheng said, and then started the fivethirtyeight blog, which gave a higher probability to Trump winning the 2016 election than most sites.