[Homunculiheaded]

As far as I can tell Wall Street has always had a penchant for pedigree in addition to skills. Large companies are often the same. People used to talk about all software engineers needing CS degrees in the future. Again in Wall Street and large companies you'll see this, but there are still plenty of well paid, talented software developers with no formal CS training.

In my experience hiring and chatting with other people hiring data scientists, there's the same trouble as there is with software engineers. No matter how many people have the training there's still a dearth of applicants that are truly talented and can actually do things. PhDs fleeing academia for a promise of easy employment and money are a huge bulk of new data scientists that I've seen and most of them have a very hard time taking deep knowledge and applying it to solve real-world problems.

At least in tech I think the future of Data Science lies in the perpetually small group of people that will have a proven track record of coming into companies and actually solving problems, just as it has been in software development.