I think there's a further split between "academic experience" and "real world experience". I'm mostly a developer to be honest, but my job title is technically

I think there's a further split between "academic experience" and "real world experience". I'm mostly a developer to be honest, but my job title is technically "data scientist". From my experience most stuff I see is not a math problem, it's a data problem. You want to optimize $thing? Well, you'll need a pipeline to fetch the necessary data and have them ready on demand, and that's actually harder than modeling. This isn't a dunk on math or research; I'm a math fan (?) if anything, I just find a large part of the discussion around ML to be very far removed from the reality on the ground.