My job title is data scientist even though you may not think of me as a 'true' data scientist. Just to give you some context I work in an ecommerce startup. Depending on your industry and the size of your company things may be very different.

I maintain one machine learning model that is very core to our business but doing 'machine learning' is a very portion of my job.

> Think about this - there are a bunch of other software developers who know SQL very well. If your advice was true, then every backend developer would be able to immediately land a data science job and do great at it without having to learn a bunch of math, ML-specific stuff and a whole other tech stack.

In some companies Data scientists are very software development oriented but that is not the case of everywhere. Think about this : software developers who know SQL very well usually don't like cleaning data, they don't necessarily have good interpersonal skills required to solve business problems, they are not necessarily interested in solving business problems, and they may tend to think that more software is the solution to all problems.