How big is the demand for DS/ML specialists in Russia?

Question

Career in IT

In the last couple of years, there has been a lot of hype around data science and talk about the fact that this is the job of the future, and in general, DCs are the new elite - salaries of 100k for juniors, an unrealistic shortage of personnel in the labor market, and so on. Usually such a message comes from large companies, which, in principle, benefit from the influx of neophytes into this area, at least in order to expand the choice and bring down the price tag, as well as online schools that sell their machine learning courses for 100-200k.
I did a little research on hh.ru, there are actually less than a hundred vacancies directly related to DS / ML (we don’t count a simple mention of a key phrase in the body of a vacancy). This is comparable to the number of vacancies for Elixir, Rust, or some non-mainstream JS framework/lib like Ember. In general, it makes sense for a well-fed but bored front-end worker to try his hand in this area or not, because the entry threshold is too high, primarily because of the need to know matan, linal, etc. well, and the DS / ML engineers themselves, and Will they remain piece goods and the market will not catch up with time in terms of the number of offers? :D

Answer 1

In general, it makes sense for a well-fed but bored front-end worker to try his hand at this area

Accumulate fat for 12 months and forward
And not for salary, of course, but for adventure

Answer 2

If you look at the Russian market, the need for new good programmers is about a thousand per year for all areas. So a hundred pieces is a hell of a lot and a big shortage of personnel.