I'm sorry, but I'm not sure that you're correct that a data scientist is a statistician who can write distributed systems. Problems have been solved for decades

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure that you're correct that a data scientist is a statistician who can write distributed systems. Problems have been solved for decades by people with quantitative training, from well before distributed systems (or computers) existed. Very roughly, a data scientist is a person with a combination of quantitative training and some programming skills, who is able to effectively analyze (and explain) different kinds of data, be they audio, text, census information, or whatever it might be. What we call data scientists today are the engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians of yesterday.