It's obvious that machine learning (ML) can't exist without data scientists. But some of the patterns I've noticed recently suggest that maybe it can't live with them, either. Data scientists may be working to advance ML and artificial intelligence (AI), but in doing so, they're working at cross-purposes with their employers. To see why, we only have to compare how data scientists work with how others in the tech space do -- software engineers, for example. We've seen amazing advances in software in the last decade.