>>66038619my job title was that of a data scientist. I know what I did. what a job title implies is not often what is applied in practice. it also varies company to company and institution to institution. my experience was to write buggy, unoptimized code to cover functions not covered by the existing software used. that wasn't my listed job duty, but it quickly became it. job titles rarely delineated what a person actually did. the data analysts did largely the same work. a software dev or software engi would later develop something based on a lot of the work. usually they took our ad-hoc scripts we used to manipulate and prune data, as the databases and software used for collected said data were old, antiquated, and never being updated. I don't consider needing to know statistical theory difficult, as any midwit can do it if they have modicum of common sense. same with any coding. some of the scientists were just useless idiots that used the tools that were given to them and never developed anything on their own. same with the analysts. They pressed buttons that did most the statistical analysis for them written by smart people long before them. They couldn't tell if there were issues or if things were behaving nominally most of the time.
the only difference between the titles of data analyst, data specialist, and data scientist at my job were the pay differences between them. it was a contract thing. the job roles were largely the same in the end. no one had some pretentious sense of elitism because they were labelled differently on the payroll.
