I'm coming from a PhD in STEM where I did a lot of application of basic ML to my (neuroscience) research, and it took me a good while to get a data science posi

I'm coming from a PhD in STEM where I did a lot of application of basic ML to my (neuroscience) research, and it took me a good while to get a data science position. But once I got the job, I have been inundated with interview requests, both from recruiters and from specific companies, as in multiple a week (granted most are blast-em-all style recruiters, that I'm sure anybody with any tech skills get). Maybe it's because I'm on the East Coast? I do feel like everybody in neuro is jumping on the bandwagon, and that generates a bit of "you don't belong here" feeling from the CS- or math- educated crowd. But over time I think this will all level-out. I'm not coming from a CS background and don't purport to know absolutely all of the details of all the mathematics and theory behind many of the machine learning algorithms that I use. I try my best daily to expand my knowledge, understand the algorithms, and apply them appropriately. I would hope that any company who is looking for someone who has a PhD-in-CS-or-ML could weed someone with lesser knowledge out during the interview process. With that being said, a couple lines of code using SciKit Learn and all the default parameters is enough to impress many non-tech companies that are looking for a way to use 'predictive' in their marketing materials. And they pay very well for it. I get the feeling that provokes the ire of people who think those types of basic implementations belong to the traditional label of 'data analyst'. For what it's worth, I work with data sets that aren't quite large enough to justify anything more than Python, Pandas, SKLearn, Luigi pipeline, and PySpark. The vast majority of my time is spent cleaning the data and generating features, must less on the hyperparameter tuning, model training side itself. Anyways, I think I'm rambling a bit. I just want to say that I LOVE this job, whatever the label is, or whatever the hype surrounding the label is, and I hope it's around for a while before it's automated...