I think a lot of people feel like data scientists get all the credit and the fun work, while we have to do all the heavy lifting and boring stuff that they need. There's this idea that data science is a special and unique skillset that couldn't possibly be possessed by a simple software engineer. Despite being largely a subdomain of CS.

I remember an era before "data scientist" was a job title. When we (programmers) would analyze data to see if we had enough information available to identify the problem, if not, fix that, then come up with a strategy to solve it, test, and finally deploy the model. The fun part was trying different solutions and analyzing the data. It also felt awesome to deploy a product that worked like "magic." Product owners didn't know or care what a neural net was, they were just happy it worked.

Now there are tons of data scientist out there who take the easy, fun, rewarding work and try to skip over the nitty gritty implementation details. Then management thinks engineering is incapable of doing such work, and the only time we get the opportunity to do something fun is to do so behind the scenes.