Data Scientist vs Big Data Engineer

Data Scientist is defined as someone who takes petra-bytes of refined data and create mathematical models, known as algorithms, to do things more efficiently and effectively.

Big Data Engineer is defined as someone who is building tools to capture petra-bytes of data, storing it, and cleaning it up for automatic reports and so that data scientists can use to build their models.

My estimation is that both roles will become increasingly more important in the upcoming decades as more and more software becomes increasingly more complex and difficult to build and maintain. While data scientist is the sexier of the two titles. I would like to know the opinions of the LinkedIn community which one is worth the money, time, research, and ultimately investment opportunity to gain major returns for an individual in the future from both a monetary perspective and a career stability perspective.

I believe that a data scientist is more in the realm of academia. My basis on that is even when algorithms are created, implemented, and facilitated in a company's processes and procedures they don't improve how business is actually done at it's core. The machines that run a company tend to be more important and interdependent on a company's day to day financial health. For all the buzz words that people keep throwing around such as "Artificial Intelligence", "Neural Networks", "Deep Learning", etc... I have noticed that any attempt in building automation tools that will displace key human thought processes have ended in monolithic failures. The projects that I have noticed that have had the greatest success rate are the collection, consolidation, sanitation, and presentation of data.

There are certainly several jobs out there that algorithms will replace such as non-essenital adminstrative and secretarial jobs that don't add immediate value to a company's profitability. The algorithms will continuously get smarter and evolve like every technology but from what I have seen and observe in my career it doesn't seem to be happening as fast as media and academia will have us believe. My rationale is that Big Data Engineer is the sounder of the two options as an investment opportunity in skills compared to a Data Scientist. However, I want opposing views of this with real-world examples and datasets if you don't mind. I would like to think I am wrong about my assumption and that algorithms will be more like evolutionary biology and simply evolve to a higher life form. I am someone in favor of automation and a robotized economy because computers by their very nature are logical and humans are not.

Thank you for your time in reading this article.