It’s just a lemon market that seems to get worse with time, everyone says that they can do anything to get a foot in the door.

Heck one of my friends has more than double my salary because he said he was a specialist in a marketing software he never heard of before the interview. Now, a year later no one is the wiser and he can buy a new Tesla twice a year (still jealous).

I think a lot has to do with bosses that never started from the bottom so they aren’t great at interviewing, because they have no clue about non-management things. Then they have no clue how productive people should be or even what to measure besides “Sprint points”.

It really depends on the project. My company is hosting multiple ML/AI projects, some with datascientist that are, as you said, glorified data analysts. Usually MBAs or mixed cursus, but also CS guys (my favourite clients as they will never tell you "i can't ssh onto my server" after executing `chmod -R 777 /etc/`).

And some with genuine DS/statisticians. Also the first kind of project almost always end up hiring statisticians in the end, so realistically, having "glorified data analysts" that can sell to the consortium or kickstart project is enough.