[dswalter]

If your target is a data scientist role at Google, you're probably going to want more schooling.

But if you've been producing value in a DS/ML role for years, you have experience, which is even more rare than some of the qualifications people are listing here.

If you can say "I created an anomaly detection system using isolation forests that 5,000 clients relied on for detecting market changes", there will always be places that want your skillset: it is kind of a new field, after all.

So the credential bloat at entry-level shouldn't really be an issue for you.