DSData Scientist
DS
Career

Data Scientist

By the numbers
Typical pay
$120,230 / yr
Education to start
Bachelor's degree
Future demand
+33.5% by 2034
People in this job
262K
Figures shown for ·closest of 2 O*NET occupations
The work
Watch · day in the life
A day, hour by hour
09:00
Data pull & triage

Query the database with SQL; check if yesterday's pipeline ran clean.

09:30
Team standup

Sync with engineers and PMs. Flag blockers, share what's shipping today.

09:50
Data wrangling

Scrub messy raw data in Python — nulls, duplicates, outliers, all of it.

11:30
Model work

Train a new prediction model; decide if fancy beats simple here.

13:30
Experiment review

Dig into A/B test results — real signal or just noise? Call it.

14:30
Stakeholder readout

Present findings to non-technical leads; skip the math, land the insight.

15:30
Dashboard build

Turn this week's analysis into charts stakeholders can actually read.

16:30
Deep dive

Chase a pattern nobody noticed — real finding or self-deception? Dig deeper.

17:30
Wrap & document

Log decisions, commit code, note what needs revisiting tomorrow.

Things you do
  • Train machine learning models to predict real-world outcomes.
  • Dig through messy data to find patterns nobody noticed before.
  • Scrub and wrangle raw data until it's clean enough to use.
  • Write Python or R code to analyze millions of rows of data.
  • Run experiments to test whether a new idea actually works.
Decisions you’ll make
  • Is this pattern in the data real, or just noise I'm fooling myself into seeing?
  • Should I build a fancier model, or will a simpler one serve the business just as well?
  • Is this data clean enough to trust, or do I need to go back and fix it first?
  • Do I have enough evidence to make a recommendation, or should I keep digging?
  • Should I explain the full technical picture, or just give stakeholders the bottom line?
Education Pathways · how you get there
100 in 100 went the college route · 0 in 100 found another way in None, typically
Education mapped from O*NET:Business Intelligence Analysts · 52% related
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