Ask HN: Is Data Science still the sexiest job of the 21st century?

From what I've seen recently "Data Scientists" are really just analysts now. 4-5 years ago it would have been expected that a data scientist would be the cross between a statistician and a senior developer, now they're just people a masters degree and 2 Machine Learning classes under their belt.

From what I can tell title of the aforementioned has changed to "Data Engineer" or something similar.

> "Do you think data science is still the sexiest job of the 21st century? Why or Why not?"

Seems like a good job as far as jobs go. You don't have to lift heavy things, not likely to die in the process of doing your job. Usually pays well, and your family will be proud of you when they talk about you at cocktail parties. So yea... its a pretty good job.

My rule of thumb is to never take career or personal finance advice from mass media articles.

As someone who has been in various roles in SF tech scene for a few years now, I've never thought of "data scientist" as a "sexy" job at all. You are basically a data analyst spending more than half your time cleaning data and waiting for queries to finish running.

Same goes for product managers...very few, if any, have authority over the actual "product vision" and spend most of their time writing tickets, project managing, in meetings.

What does sexy mean in this context?

I thought being a Hollywood star or footballer is the sexiest job - data science is just trying to fit some models to data and then selling your superiors on results of your analysis.