[srconstantin]

Look -- as long as "data scientist" is a sexy job title, a lot of different jobs are going to claim they fall under that umbrella. I have an applied math background, and I'm fine with scientific computing, but I have much less experience with databases. I'm a very different candidate than a software engineer who took a machine learning course. Maybe in a few years we'll have more intelligent language for making those distinctions.

It shouldn't be surprising or bad news that some "data scientists" have deeper knowledge than others. We're going through a quantitative revolution -- many fields and industries are nearly untouched by statistical analysis/machine learning, and so there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in going from "nothing" to "something." Even somebody who only knows a little can add value at these margins. But, of course, that won't be true forever -- look at quantitative finance, which is very competitive and requires a lot of education, because the low-hanging fruit was picked in the 90's.

There's room in this world for the statistician, the mathematician, the database engineer, the AI guy, the data visualization expert, the codemonkey who knows a few ML methods, etc.