Trouble understanding this market.
This is all my thoughts. No AI was used in this post.
I am a Data Scientist at one of the Consulting Firms. I have around 10yoexp and make in the 40-45lpa range. Been with this firm for over 2 years now.
I have a broad background in CV/NLP/GenAI, moving with the times, and have built considerable applications, some fairly advanced within GenAI, although only few around MCP, Agents.
I am trying to understand where to go from here for a higher pay/better ic opportunities and good wlb, and there seems to be limited options. I spoke with a few recruiters, but somehow no one is interested in offering upwards of 60lpa. One recruiter even suggested lowering expectations to the 50-55 range.
Plus the technical interviews, few that I've had have been bizarre. One ended up becoming a classical ML round, the other a live coding session where I had to implement a few functions in a RAG pipeline and make few improvements. I bombed both one early on and another one 2 stages in. I think I am in a deep comfort zone and have no idea how to climb out of it.
Meanwhile I see people getting pretty good offers. I know preparation and opportunity must meet at the right time. But I am also not getting a good grasp of this plot this time.
I'm trying to understand where to place my expectations for interviews, role expectations, pay and most importantly what I should prepare for going ahead.
I am feeling frustrated. What does the community think? How do I get to higher paying jobs in the data science scene right now? What are interviewers looking for?