There’s a lot of truth in this, but I find the people that pivot toward practical software engineering skills early in their PhD are still highly valuable to te

There’s a lot of truth in this, but I find the people that pivot toward practical software engineering skills early in their PhD are still highly valuable to tech companies. I think the issue here is you can’t become highly skilled in software engineering overnight, and compensating by flexing softer “problem solving skills” isn’t enough to compensate. If you want to be effective in data science, you need to commit to being a rockstar programmer AND statistician AND be well versed in a number of different algorithms. Unsurprisingly, this is difficult, and so the market of people who do it well is small. That’s not, however, a referendum on the value of predictive modeling and software engineering. I don’t see advanced math and software engineering skills going out of fashion anytime soon, simply because they are hard to acquire and immensely powerful in the right hands.