[CuriouslyC]

I can definitely corroborate this. If you don't have a PhD in a quant field, landing a job off your resume alone is really hard. Last time I was job hunting I tuned my resume towards data science positions, but while I got ~30% hit rate on software engineering positions, I never got a single data science callback.

I've talked to a lot of data scientists, and I can't recall any without a PhD said they were initially hired for that role. I have met quite a few that were initially hired as a support programmers then moved into data science once they had their foot in the door though.