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Comment by tibbar | Hacker News Reader

Wait, data analysis/data science is still a thriving human job sector! It's just that you can do way more analysis, way faster, than you could before.

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Is it? I don’t really hire for analysts anymore because you can mostly just expose chat with your data mcp tools that end users can use and that gets you 80% of the way there. The person who puts together dashboards and writes sql against the star schema is pretty much a thing of the past.

Data engineers, on the other hand… way more relevant than ever before

The issue is that data complexity is also exploding in the age of LLMs, so it still takes a lot of archaeology to get reliable (as opposed to plausible) numbers.

I think this dynamic also requires more data engineers, but I don't personally see the split in demand between those roles that you describe. Data analysts often have business or domain context that data engineers lack.

Perhaps we'll start rolling data analysis work into "operations".

Data is weird because it became very specialized very quickly. We'll still need data people but they'll cover a broader scope than before.

The implications of custom dashboards for every question are huge, but will require a lot of harness and tool building to realize.

The next decade or do will be all about building tools for different domains.

It's the difference between Architects and Draftsmen. We still need the former, but the latter is gone, replaced by Solidworks, AutoCAD, and digital plotters or large-format printers.

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