I had the same experience recommending private sector jobs to a scientist friend of mine. He just finished a Ph.D. in chemistry at a very prestigious program. This (inevitably) involved doing a lot of analysis of experimental results in Python. "You're not a real data scientist" was the over-arching conclusion of his effort to get a job doing data analysis, even for comparatively lame old-school BI type analyses. This is very silly and unbelievably short-sighted.