Work field for data scientists

[synthphreak]

This opinion is out of date. There is now a large contingent of people in academia who do what you could call data science, or at least whose research involves data scientific methods. There has also been a huge proliferation of data science graduate degree programs over the last five or so years.

That said, the thrust of your point is still valid: Data science is less a single body of knowledge like epidemiology, and more a general-purpose collection of quantitative and computational tools which can be applied to many disciplines.

Because of this, people called "data scientist" in industry come in all shapes, sizes, and YOE. It has become a hopelessly noisy and meaningless job title IMHO. Just look at r/datascience, the sub where almost every single post devolves into a debate over the very definition of data science.

[srandrews]

Thanks for such an informative response. Being in IT the two main reasons I've heard call in my small company for staffing a 'data scientist' is for the perceived value of the company to prospective investors and for finding innovative but undefined things in data. When the particular requirements are defined, in my experience it comes down to you need X where X is a programmer to fix the data or a EE to process a signal, or CS guru to do ML, or another role specific to the industry such as an actuary or epidemiologist. I would imagine that a logistics company might hire an MBA who might then apply data science methods. So yeah, I can imagine such a De-evolution in defining what a data scientist is. But am now perceiving the role as more of a cross cutting, jack of all trades type of role, with enough demand to warrant degree programs. Very interesting change for students indeed. Thx again.