The Revenge of the Data Scientist

Is the heyday of the data scientist over? The Harvard Business Review once called it “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century.”1 In tech, data scientist roles were often among the best paid.2 The job also demanded an unusual mix of skills: Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician. — JosH100 (@josh_wills) May 3, 2012 In addition to creating a high-barrier to entry, these skills enabled data scientists to build predicitive models, measure casuality and find patterns in data. Of these, predicitive modeling paid best. Companies later peeled that work off into a new title: Machine Learning Engineer (“MLE”).3 For years, shipping AI meant keeping data scientists and MLEs on the critical path. With LLMs, this stopped being the default. Foundation-model APIs now allow teams to integrate AI independently. Getting cut out of the loop rattled data scientists and MLEs I know. If the company no longer…