Good job on the detailed write-up! I agree for the most part. The funny thing is, people will be posting vacancies for DA , but inside the JD is actually for DS lol. Basically the same story as as other tech jobs, where companies need to hire an entire IT department but only can afford to pay for 1 person, therefore we give him an inflated title like "CTO" or "Head of IT" and maybe give him some stock options. Now, imagine this "CTO" can't actually code but only can talk cock about fluffy concepts. That is the state of things in our country now. Much cringe.

In Malaysia, most companies already "koyak" at the data collection stage. They think they need a DS as a magic bullet to fix the whole thing but they don't. NOT YET. What they really need is a team of data engineers to solve the root problem first. DE is very un-sexy job but it is the first step that you cannot afford to fuck up if you are serious about deploying machine learning models in the organisation. So in terms of practicality if you need a job, I'd say DE is the most secure one. Without DE, literally the whole data team can die.