[Eridrus]

So, I agree that data work is a large part of the job.

When presented with a new problem, you have to build the data infrastructure before you can do any learning.

But if you are on a team maintaining a project over the long term, you amortise the cost of this a bit. You will still see big impacts from improving your data, but you will also see big improvements from modeling improvements, though often that will just be plugging in a different box.

But I actually think this is a good thing of your goal is to build applications. These methods are hot right now because they are very good at things that are hard for us to program, so they let us build better systems.

One other thing I'll mention is that GDPR has made a lot of inane things pretty painful, largely due to overly conservative lawyers. This is probably mostly an issue for large consumer tech companies.