You're 100% right that "data scientist" is a fancy made-up term for people who mostly do statistics. In the same way, "software engineer" is a fancy made-up ter

You're 100% right that "data scientist" is a fancy made-up term for people who mostly do statistics. In the same way, "software engineer" is a fancy made-up term for people who mostly do programming. The fact that data science is basically statistics supports the argument of the guy who is saying data science and software engineering are different jobs. If you are a software engineer and want to be a data scientist, you are free to switch careers. Or maybe work as an engineer for a startup that could use someone to do statistics on the side. But that might be a bad move with no experts around. With data science, your work product is often conclusions and advice. Those are highly susceptible to bullshit. You don't get a compiler or unit tests that tell you that you are coming to the wrong conclusion and giving bad advice. It takes experience and judgement to get that right, not just hacking on an IPython notebook and accepting what the model spits out.