What is surprising from this shotty paper is that they conclude boring people are perceived as "less competent".
Seems counter-intuitive, considering accounting and taxes.
They did two different studies. One took a list of occupations, and asked the respondents “Joe is an accountant. How boring does that make him seem, 1-7?”
The other study then created a vignette combining attributes that were individually rated into a bigger description, then asked “how competent (skilled, hard-working) does this person seem?”
So the connection is boringness -> low competency, and not necessarily all data analyst -> boring.
Data analyst was down the list a bit on boringness - less than accounting, law, and a few others. Mathematics on the other hand had the lowest boringness rating of the occupations.