[achompas]

I think this is closer to reality. Tim is not competing with many folks like him -- he's a knowledgable, experienced, and capable data scientist with significant infrastructure experience, and a net positive to any team he joins. Some problems possibly originating from the company perspective

(1) They are inundated with applications folks of all sorts of backgrounds: engineering, finance, academia, marketing, BI/analytics, etc.

(2) They still haven't figured out hiring. To be fair, no one really has figured it out. Jeff Kolesky recently covered this as part of an excellent blog post. [0]

(3) In addition to the typical variance in engineering interview processes, we now introduce variance in the definition of data science across companies, which just complicates things further.

(4) Basically everything else Tim mentioned in his post: role or goals aren't clearly defined, remote data science is an unknown, etc.

[0] http://kolesky.com/datums/job-search/