I hope more people read this comment and take it to heart— there’s a wide variety of extremely high paying roles that require relatively basic statistics but index hard on your ability to apply it in a professional setting.

Let me give an example. I want to know the impact of a digital ad on a population. Sounds simple enough— but how do I know who my population is? How do I know if they saw an ad? How do I know what actions and activities they took? How do I investigate the quality of my upstream tables to ensure that, once I’ve described the data I need that I’ve found the best sources for that data? How do I identify errors in implementation/which parts of the dataset are complete junk because there’s lots of terrible code that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do? What do I use as a control, if indeed a control is even possible?

If you’ve taken care of all of the above, and have a clean dataset of people, exposed, and activities partaken in— well then it’s an easy question. The reality is that you’ll basically never have those things, and there’s a premium for people who can go out and figure it out given a vague ask.