[compcoffee]

>As someone who has been producing value in a data science/machine learning role for multiple years, it's disheartening to see comments that I may be blacklisted from positions due to "only" having a bachelor's degree.

Don't worry.

The big salaries will go to people who create value and solve problems. You can do that without a PhD. In fact, if most Data Science communities are representative, PhDs feel they're above 90% of the work required to put data to work to solve problems. You know, the ones who walk into a job and say, "Oh, I don't get to apply the latest algorithm onto a perfectly cleaned toy data set? I'm leaving!". They're going to have their lunch eaten.

[prestonh]

I come from the background you describe, have lots of friends from the same background, and my experience has been the opposite. Most people know that data is messy business and that as data scientists we will often serve more as engineers in our day to day work.

[citation_please]

Hah. I want to feel this is right. I like to think of my work as the "full-stack" equivalent of the "data science" career path. There's no part of the data pipeline I'm not currently doing/qualifed to do/interested in doing: acquisition, transformation, storage, exploration, analysis, machine learning, presentation & dashboarding, integration, server maintenance & operations...

The "toy examples" require only a very small subset of the skills required to extract business value from an amorphous blob of data.