Data science roles are still “sexy” but not immune to the job market turmoil.

Being a data scientist was supposed to be “the sexiest job of the 21st century”. Whether the famous Harvard Business Review aphorism of 2012 holds water is somewhat subjective, depending on how you interpret “sexy”. However, the data around data scientists, as well as related data engineering and data analyst roles, are starting to ring alarms.

The subjective part about HBR’s aphorism is whether you actually enjoy finding and cleaning up data, building and debugging data pipelines and integration code, as well as building and improving machine learning models. That list of tasks, in that order, is what data scientists spend most of their time on.

Some people are genuinely attracted to data-centered careers by the job description; the growth in demand and salaries more attracts others. While the dark sides of the job description itself are not unknown, the growth and salaries part was not disputed much. That, however, may be changing: data scientist roles are still in demand but are not immune to market turmoil.

At the beginning of 2022, the first sign that something may be changing became apparent. As an IEEE Spectrum analysis of data released by online recruitment firm Dice showed, in 2021, AI and machine learning salaries dropped, even though, on average, U.S. tech salaries climbed nearly 7%.

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