[dworin]

In my experience, Data Science isn't replacing statistics, it's replacing Business Intelligence. And a lot of that is driven by PR and marketing departments that saw that business intelligence was boring and trapped them in the IT department, so they needed new buzz words. You can see the relationship on Google Trends as well, and it's stronger than comparing it to 'statistician', which looks flat more than declining:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=data%20science%2C%20...

[exelius]

This is spot on. It's another name for BI, which was another name for reporting, albeit with fancier tools. But fundamentally the job is about querying, aggregating and representing data -- the methods by which these are done may be more complex, but the goals of the data are the same. It's just that with so much more data available, there need to be a lot more people to build the reporting systems.

But yeah, you're right, nobody wants to do reporting because it's tedious and doesn't pay particularly well. And really, most suits are just looking for data that fits the story they want to tell, so the quality of the analysis that many "data scientists" do is irrelevant. This isn't the case at every company, but I've seen it happen enough to know it's not a rare occurrence.