There aren’t any people over the age of like 35 who started their career in data science. Careers are sticky, people don’t like switching once they’re in one. They’re being trained quickly and I think you’re right, the salary used to be higher than a normal software dev but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

> Also, I'm not sure about the supply and demand argument. The typical ask for a data scientist is much simpler than specialized ChemE knowledge; supply should have ramped up so quickly that comp would have fallen to typical engineering salaries long ago if that were the case.

I would question my assumptions before disputing the function of supply and demand curves.

There is a severe oversupply of engineering graduates in the US, that's all there is to it. All hardware engineering jobs have been colocated with the actual manufacturing facilities they are designing for – i.e., Asia-Pacific. Even the reduced number of graduates is too many, because the demand is virtually zero. People are not dying and retiring as fast as the industry itself is.