The thing to note is that data scientist interviewing culture at companies is a function of who their first data scientist is or who the founder or whatever t

The thing to note is that data scientist interviewing culture at companies is a function of who their first data scientist is or who the founder or whatever things the first data scientist should look like. This is why you have a wide variance from companies that look at people only with applied math and a background in Clojure to companies that require data scientists to be well versed in Java to companies that require statisticians. It has reached the stage where I think it is easier to sell yourself as an awesome scaling/data engineer and quietly do whatever data analytics you want when you get in. FWIW, I agree with you that quantitative social science is a great background to have. My data science team lead has a background in Neuroscience and he seems to be having fun applying that intuition to recommendations.