[goodpoint]

Spot on. "Data science" and "Machine learning" are indeed hyped up terms.

Most of the work is basics statistics, some SQL and poking at a ML library until you get the output you wanted.

Unsurprisingly, the day to day work can be very underwhelming.

[princeb]

i spent some time in "data science", back when it was just called "research", in a corporate environment.

95% of your value as a "data scientist" is figuring out how to squeeze diamonds from tons and tons of steaming piles of sh*t, and that kind of work is basically just filtering, collating, collecting, organizing from disparate data sets with different fields, data types, formats, some of them with varying degrees of accuracy. it's not fun, but very few other people are doing it, and the result is valuable to a lot of people, so it pays well.