I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that most companies have data that is too big for a non-distributed environment.
I do think that most companies log lots of data in different places without much thought or structure, and as a result need a "data scientist", who spends most of their time simply aggregating and cleaning data that can then easily be processed on a single machine. ie: they spend 10% of their time doing statistics.
Maybe I'm wrong, but the above is how all the data scientists that I know describe their work.
Most of a data scientist's time is definitely spent getting data from various places, possibly enriching it, cleaning it, and converting it into a dataframe that can then be modeled (and surprisingly a lot of those tasks are often beyond pure actuaries / statisticians who often get nervous writing SQL queries with joins nevermind Spark jobs)...
But also once you've got that dataframe, it's often too big to be processed on a single machine in the office so you need to spin up a VM and move the data around which also requires a lot more computer science / hacking skills than you typically learn in a stats university degree so I think the term data scientist for someone who can do the computer sciency stuff in addition to the stats has its place...
I do think that most companies log lots of data in different places without much thought or structure, and as a result need a "data scientist", who spends most of their time simply aggregating and cleaning data that can then easily be processed on a single machine. ie: they spend 10% of their time doing statistics.
Maybe I'm wrong, but the above is how all the data scientists that I know describe their work.