Good data scientist, bad data scientist
This highlights one of my main complaints about the DS role. You are expected to have strong business intuition, sufficient coding skills to hold down a SWE role, a strong background in stats/math, know all the ML/DS specific skills and lastly, have technical depth in the subdomain you are looking to solve. All of this, while being paid the exact same as someone on the SWE or PM track.<p>No one can do it all. DSs that do 70% of these are the best of the best.<p>Mature DS groups have figured out that you have to pick your poison, and focus on archetypes rather than a 'well rounded' DS. 
Here are a few DS archetypes that I've seen.<p>1. The NLP/Vision/RL domain expert: High depth, low breadth people. Not very concerned with business intuition. Strong grasp of math for their domain. Moderate coding abilities, but pipelining for their field is fairly well defined. What is SQL?<p>2. The Generalist : Comes close to the 'good data scientist' outlined here. Never publishes, solves DS problems, will probably struggle to reach principal IC level in any specific product group because they lack the prerequisite depth. Will often become a manager down the line though and can also become an excellent PM at some point. SQL is their life blood. The less business savvy people see them as MBA-adjacent. But, they are super important.<p>3. Mr Maths or the Statistician : Pairs excellently with #4<p>4. The MLE who doesn't want to be an MLE - Excellent coding skills. Sufficient ML/DS skills. Just hasn't found a way to get their foot in the door to transition to a DS role without taking a pay cut.<p>5. The Researcher : Hiring a researcher in the wrong team can lead to a completely ineffective team. Also, not having a researcher in a team that needs it can lead to everyone going around in circles.<p>Top DSs will manage to host a max of 2 archetypes in them. Trying to get your DS to host >2 archetypes, is a losing battle. This is as good as it is going get. Also, most teams don't need all archetypes.<p>Identify the archetypes you need. Get some coverage over them through your hired DSs and let them continue growing along their selected archetypes.