>Many people believe that programming is an essential skill. In my opinion, programming is just a tool. Modern no-code and low-code platforms have made this skill less critical for entering the field.<p>> What matters most is the result - how effectively you can use available tools to solve problems.<p>This depends on the organization(s) where a DS may work. If a DS is working within an organization with a robust BI/DE/whatever team that does all of the ingestion, normalization, cleaning, and pipelining of data for the DS, programming is far less important and concentration on the results of what is done w/those prepared data is far more important. But, if the DS is working in a bubble, forced to do all of the aforementioned work themselves, programming is an absolute requirement.<p>Taking a near-perfect prepared dataset and deriving modeled insights requires no huge programming lift from a DS in 2025; they may be able to copy-paste LLM- or Stackoverflow-derived pieces of code and spend their time on the insight derivation and next steps.<p>But, in many companies, there just isn't a robust and flexible set of teams that do the correct prep work for the DS to do what they do best and some sort of hybridized data/analytics engineer/DS is required to get to those insights--albeit with less time for the modeling, analyses, and outputs.<p>YMMV.