This is somewhat the reason I switched careers from data science into data engineering. My experience was that most companies weren't mature enough to really m

This is somewhat the reason I switched careers from data science into data engineering. My experience was that most companies weren't mature enough to really make use of any sort of "real" data science. But there was always some data sources sitting around somewhere that could be copied around, cleaned up, then thrown into Looker. After a while, this collection of data sources will turn into a data warehouse, and a network effect will kick in, making looker (or tableau/etc) broadly useful for other people in the company. Most of the teams I work with need simple reports to do their job. There's no need for predictions or self-learning classifications. Mostly things like, is the information in these three systems consistent? If not, can an alert be sent to notify someone? That being said, even my current company has 10x as many DSes as DEs and I'm pretty confident that all of them are like the author of this article. I can't blame them for taking a better paying, far more prestigious job with several times as many openings in the industry.