I just came across this year-old tweet by my former Udacity colleague, Mat Leonard.
When I read that, I thought, that’s ironic, because so much of how we taught machine learning at Udacity focused on modeling.
And sure, enough, the next tweet in the thread:
I think a lot of labeling and cleaning is outsourced, either to specialty companies, or to specialty teams within a larger ML organization. Perhaps there’s an opportunity for ML engineer to learn more about data labeling and cleaning.
Mat, by the way, now leads the education team at OpenMined.
David Silver 
I think it’s safe to say that the emphasis on models (in the ML “lore” writ large) contributes to a number of hiring managers’ inflated expectations and lack of appreciation for the extremely outsized role that data plays in the process. I speak from experience.
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