This is a hot career right now but I bet in 10 years a lot of it will be automated to the point where we won ' t be touching code . Our skills are highly technical and demand somewhat of a wage premium so the pressure to automate is there . Beyond the minimum , the skills you want to develop to be successful in industry are 1 the soft ones and 2 the ability to conduct a research problem . Can you explain to the senior partner why they should should care about the cool machine vision model you built ? Can you work with a team of engineers to get it implemented correctly ? Did the training set you used have enough black people in it ? No ? Well congratulations it ' s now classifying black people as gorillas and you ' ve just been fired to save face . Almost no one is going to pay you 500 k a year to do actual data science . What you want to do is figure out how to apply those skills in a business context and then lead a team in order to leverage the experience into upper management . Tldr If you can ' t translate your skills into money , no one will give a flying fuck about your AUCGini .