In my experience, many companies are wanting to hire a lot more data scientists (and paying them six-figure salaries to boot), when what they really are looking

In my experience, many companies are wanting to hire a lot more data scientists (and paying them six-figure salaries to boot), when what they really are looking for are what has traditionally been called a "data analyst" position. I.E., the entire sum of the job is Excel reporting and basic statistics, but instead wrapped in some "Machine Learning" marketing language. 100% Agree. Some of the execs I reported into were obsessed with the idea of being a startup within a large organization, and part of this was the assumption that one of the things startups did was use data better than big companies. To them, there was some hidden value in their data that their Business Analysts did not have the skills to unlock. Data Scientists are perceived as the magic key to unlock this value, even when what the business is asking for doesn't make sense or isn't feasible in the short-term. One of the small ways we delivered value was to write small ETL scripts that fed into Tableau dashboards. People loved the Dashboards because it cut down on so much Excel stuff that was done weekly/monthly/quarterly, etc. The company did have a large IT org with a BI team, but they were always busy and took months to do anything. So for us to do ETL+Tableau in a few days was seen as a miracle. Plus, Tableau has an Excel export :) Of course, ETL+Tableau wasn't enough to retain the team.