• It sounds like someone is trying to make an argument to have 2 people do a job for one person. Better yet, 3 people if you include a tech resource, because believe it or not, most data scientist have huge tech gaps and or are not the right people for doing what a DBA, BI Dev, ETL Dev, or even data engineer should be doing with the data scientist or data analyst.

    I do have pretty strong opinions on the data scientist role though. I don't think it's right to refine these guys down to the languages and tools of the trade. It's much more than just learning how to speak English and knowing all the fancy algorithms. The math portion, being able to prove what you have done with math, on top of explain it in a way that makes sense, and actually knowing what method to go with based on that science is really what defines someone from a data scientist from a data analyst or even a visualization expert.

    However, learning the language and the tools is a good start. It's just not everything nor will it likely ever be for the time being no matter what new tool allows you to push a button and output a predictive model. When it comes to making critical business decisions, people still want to know how and why you came up with whatever. A data analyst or a citizen data scientist is not going to be able to do that. Likely, only the data scientist can.