In defense of statistical modeling

Data science has been hot for many years now, attracting attention and talent. There is a persistent thread of commentary, though, that says data science's core skill of statistical modeling is overhyped and that managers and aspiring data scientists should focus on engineering instead. Vicki Boykis' 2019 blog post was the first article I remember along these lines. Don't do a degree in data science, don't do a bootcamp…It's much easier to come into a data science and tech career through the "back door", i.e. starting out as a junior developer, or in DevOps, project management, and, perhaps most relevant, as a data analyst, information manager, or similar… While tuning models, visualization, and analysis make up some component of your time as a data scientist, data science is and has always been primarily about getting clean data in a single place to be used for interpolation. More recently, Gartner's 2020 AI hype cycle report acknowledges the role of data scientists but says: Gartner foresees developers being the major force in AI.