In 2025 I'm Still All In On Data
Was data only a good career when it was easy and you didn't need to be good?
I've seen various things around the internet questioning whether it's still worth it to become a data person in 2025.
Since I haven't seen anyone take up the pro-data side of this argument, I thought I'd do it myself.
Why People Are Down On Data
The main arguments I’ve seen against data work seem to be:
It's harder to find jobs than it used to be
There's too much pressure on data teams to show business results and many data people are at risk of being fired if they aren't delivering enough
With the rise of AI business users will be able to answer questions themselves and might not need data teams
These points are true, but they don't seem like they should have any bearing on your personal decision of whether a data career is a good decision or not.
Let's go through these points one by one...
1. It’s Harder To Find Jobs Than It Used To Be
Was a High Paying Easy-To-Get Job Ever Sustainable?
Was it only worth becoming a data person if it was easy?
Having worked in finance before the “dawn of data science,” it only seems natural to me that jobs which pay substantially higher than average will be competitive, not easy to get. You can't just roll out of a bootcamp and get a neurosurgery residency or an analyst job at Goldman Sachs.
It also shouldn't be expected that you roll in and get a high paying data job either. What other job out there pays great wages for something that is easy?
If you know of a career that is easier / more fun / more exciting for you than data work and pays better than data work, you SHOULD take it!
But if you want to have a successful data career for whatever reason initially attracted you about data work, you should want to be a strong candidate to be a good data person vs. just get a data job because it's easy.
Also - Actual Data Jobs Have Never Been Easy
As any experienced data person will tell you, once you get the job, data work is actually hard. If you thought things were going to be easy once you got the job, you would be wrong.
Twenty years in and it’s still not easy.
Did You Only Want To Be A Data Person For A Short Time?
If you don’t have the perfect background, it might now take a year or two to get a data job vs. being able to walk in right out of a bootcamp. If you want to be a data person for the next 40 years of your life, is that a big deal?
Most other high paying professional jobs require extra training and schooling - sometimes many years worth. It’s three extra years of graduate school to become a lawyer in the US. Even more to become a doctor.
2. There Are Now Actual Expectations Of Business Results
Did you want to scam companies that pay you but don't actually benefit from your work?
Who would want a career like this? The fact that businesses are expecting actual business results from data teams is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing.
Great data people want to actually make a difference.
If you find yourself in a situation where you're not making a difference and you're just wasting your company’s time and money, you should get out of that situation as fast as possible and into a job where you are contributing.
I wouldn't necessarily agree that businesses haven’t previously had expectations for data teams, but if YOU believed this was the state of the data world, you should have been smart enough to realize that it is an unsustainable state.
No business will keep funding highly paid people and expensive systems that can't deliver actual business results.
You Should Want To Be In The Action
The best data people I know don't worry that they can't be valuable to companies.
That is such a weak frame I pity anyone who operates in it. It’s similar to a sales person that worries they might actually need to sell something one day. Who could ever imagine a successful salesperson thinking this way?
You want to be in the action where things are happening. You want to influence and be a part of the important things going on in your company.
You might fail, and that failure might get you fired. But if you’re successful you will get many benefits.
And yes, great data people might lose their jobs anyways if their company shuts down or if layoffs happen 5 levels above them or a new leader comes in and wants to clean house. But they might also get hit by a bus - you can’t control everything.
Anyone who worries that they might actually have to deliver business results to keep their job shouldn't be a data person.
3. AI Might Change Data Work
Will The Future World Need More Data?
To be clear, AI WILL change data work, but nobody actually knows how…
A better question might be: What about data won’t change?
I've been around long enough to have lived through a few cycles, so here's a question that gets more to the heart of the long-term viability of a data career vs. any supply / demand imbalance in certain markets at certain times:
Will there be more databases in the future?
Will there be more data pipelines in the future?
Will there be more machine learning models in the future?
Will there be more analytical decisions made in the future?
Is there any evidence that regular non-data people are going to be substantially better at these things without data people?
I think that to the first four bullet points, the answer to whether there will be more data and whether that data will remain or grow in importance is obviously true.
And non-data people don’t seem to be changing substantially outside of whatever impact you see from AI.
How AI Will Change Things?
AI will change things in ways that seem hard to predict right now.
To the question of whether AI will make human data people obsolete, my instinct is no for the following reasons:
Why haven't extremely cheap data people in low wage countries already made high wage data people obsolete?
What percentage of the actual work you do as a data person do you think can be easily handed off to an AI model? Most of your code is already coming from libraries and open source / commercial tools vs. functionality you need to build from scratch yourself. Did the shift from "everyone needs to write all libraries and functionality as custom software" to "almost everything is already built" end up creating more or fewer data jobs? Is that shift more profound than what you think AI will be able to do?
Is your alternative to data work becoming a plumber / carpenter or another corporate job? Because given how data is an underlying requirement of any future AI, most non-data corporate jobs would be more likely to be disrupted vs. data jobs
Does this mean that data as we know it won’t change with AI?
No - I’m certain it will change.
But to everyone who is convinced it’s SO OBVIOUS that data people will shortly become obsolete, above are some points on the other side.
Bombastic Catastrophizing
It's exciting and profitable to catastrophize. Catastrophic posts go viral on LinkedIn. None of those people making crazy predictions will face any consequences for being wrong in the long term.
To be clear, I ALSO cannot predict the future.
When I graduated college 20 years ago, I could not have predicted where the data world would go, and I also can't predict what 20 years from now will look like.
One lesson I’ve learned is to be careful of those people making bombastic predictions of how everything will change in the future, because they generally don't come true.
And if jobs as we know it collapse because of AI, either the entire world will be completely screwed at the same time, or the transition to the future will be slow enough that you can take advantage of opportunities to pivot over the years.
In Conclusion
Data seems like it will continue to be important in the future. If your plan was to learn basic SQL and then coast in a high paying data job delivering no business results for the next 40 years then this plan will hopefully not work in the future.
However, if your goal is to be a great data person who drives real value to companies, I believe you will always be in high demand. And if you're the kind of data person who can combine technology and business skills to drive real impact, even if "AI changes everything" you personally will only have more tools to be even more successful in the future.