“Nobody knew or even cared what the difference was between good and bad data science work.”
The job, as described, is lending a doomed project the look of objectivity because a manager already picked the answer. The work is only as good as the weakest engineer, PM or boss upstream. So he moved to data engineering, where the output either runs or it doesn’t. The “sexiest job of the 21st century” turned out to be making slides for people who don’t read them.