This matches my experience exactly. About 5 years ago I was coming out of academia with a PhD in chemistry wanting to get into tech. Someone pointed me toward

This matches my experience exactly. About 5 years ago I was coming out of academia with a PhD in chemistry wanting to get into tech. Someone pointed me toward data science and I was immediately pulled in by the potential for deep insights and working with interesting data sets. After getting into an industry research position, I was quickly disillusioned by the talk from our leadership of how we needed to become an "AI company" and discovered that was I really wanted to be doing was classic algorithm development, not data science. Now, I've see so much poorly implemented, unnecessary machine learning applied to problems that didn't need it that I first assume that any machine learning project is a bad technical decision until proven otherwise. I've happily moved into an engineering role building interesting pipelines.