This comment is not meant to disparage anyone who considers themselves a data scientist. However, as someone who has advanced degrees in both statistics and computer science, employers and recruiters outside of R&D roles have shown very little interest in my statistical background aside from my machine learning experience. My experimental design, data handling (not just data cleaning, but data collection) skills, and theoretical understanding are rarely discussed. Statisticians are compensated much less than programmers--maybe deservedly so--but to that extent that I'm compensated the same as a "data scientist" who only studied computer science and didn't study any statistics, I feel like many employers, even those who benefit heavily from them, don't properly compensate statisticians.

At my alma mater, the poor wages have really hurt the statistics program as more students have decided to enroll in the "data science" (typically housed within business or computer science departments) programs. I think this is a really unfortunate trend because while those programs teach you how to implement gradient descent, do basic data wrangling in Python and R, make data visualizations, etc. they don't teach experimental design or the statistical theory that drives applied statistics. Perhaps as the supply of well-trained statisticians decreases and demand increases there will be upward wage pressure, but I think it's more likely that unqualified and inexperienced "data scientists" will continue to be shoehorned into these empty roles instead.