[apohn]

While I generally agree, I think there's a point in these 2 statements that can easily misinterpreted.

>It is likely that the Data Scientist role is in a long term decline...

Also

> Data science is in decline and vaguely defined

Reading this, you can think that "Data Science" jobs are decreasing. But I don't think that's true.

Let's just say that it's 2017 and I hire a team of 3 people with the job title of Data Scientist. One ends up focusing on the data side, one on modeling+analysis, and one on building the infrastructure. In 2023, I decide to change the job titles so one of them is now a Data engineer, one is now a Data Scientist, and one is now a ML Engineer to match what is happening in the job market.

It's still 3 jobs with 3 people doing the same thing. So the number of jobs aren't decreasing, but their titles are more specific. Overall, the number of "Data Science" jobs are still doing up.

Somebody will say "But that's exactly what the author said." But I think people who are new(ish) to this field might read it as "Data Science Jobs are decreasing." So I'm making this comment.

> skills such as data mining and visualisation are also out of favour.

Honestly, I just don't believe this. It's possible that as job descriptions are filled with different buzzwords, people just leave these out. For visualization it's also possible that there is a bigger focus on keywords of an established BI tool (e.g. PowerBI) instead of ad-hoc charts in matplotlib or ggplot. But some degree of data mining and visualization is useful, even to Data Engineers.