Goodbye, data science
I have to agree with a lot of this - I started my career as a data scientist right out of a STEM PhD back when the term just started coming into existence. At the time, anyone who wanted to get hired as a Data Scientist needed to be trained as a professional scientist, i.e. have a PhD - at first my expectation that the purpose of my job was to apply the scientific method to solve business problems by leveraging the companies own data as the empirical evidence - whether I did this using machine learning, excel tables or a chalkboard didn&#x27;t matter. ML was a barely used term at the time, the first version of Tensorflow wasn&#x27;t released until later that year.<p>But over time, the higher up I climbed the more I realized the job had marginal business impact. Usually a big company would hire a bunch of PhDs with fancy degrees and stick them in some &quot;Advance Analysis&quot; department and leverage them as internal consultants, which just meant creating some models, writing a powerpoint deck, get a pat on the back from the execs - not a single model would ever see the day of light. I got all the way up to Director this way, before calling it quits this January, at the end I had basically nothing to do except work on &quot;corporate AI strategy&quot;, which meant writing presentations and white papers for upper management.<p>It was comparatively easy job, one could coast their entire life in some of these corporations - especially in government sanctioned oligopolies like banking.