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often (usually?) DS are paid less than SWEs of the same level!

I have plenty of cynical thoughts as to what drives that compensation gap. Maybe the simplest is just that there is high supply of people with these baseline skills and it isn't easy to distinguish if somebody is good or not.

I think there is just more demand for SWEs. Nearly every company will have software engineers, but not every company has data scientists and even the ones that do will almost certainly have more engineers than data scientists.

After all, you can't use data science to optimise your product or service if you don't have sufficient engineers to build it and maintain it in the first place.

As always, it's supply and demand. DS is often not needed as much as SWE and there is a lot of supply for DS, due to hype and ease of transition from people in other fields.

%s/not/don't companies/