hi!
I’ve been working as a data scientist for 2 years, and I should probably note that I work at a traditional/non-tech company, I’m sure data scientists at tech companies have a very different experience
I majored in math in college and I got a masters in statistics, and I took only 2 courses in that time fully dedicated to coding, one was in C++ and the other was in SAS. several of my upper-level undergrad courses and all of my masters-level courses used some MATLAB, SAS, or R. I taught myself the basics of SQL and Python (mainly pandas and scikit-learn, two critical Python libraries for data science) before I applied for jobs because they came up a lot in job descriptions. I mentioned 6 coding languages there, but actually the only coding languages in my day-to-day work are SQL and Python, which I mostly taught myself
as you can see from this blog I’m not exactly a newbie to coding, and I remember coding CSS and HTML as early as age 10 or 11, so my experience may not be universal, but I don’t think coding is hard. in fact, coding will probably end up being your favorite part of your job as a data scientist. it beats attending meetings, preparing slides, writing emails, and (the worst of all personally) updating documentation
but math is one of the fundamental skills you will need as a data scientist, so just because you don’t necessarily need it for coding, you will probably need it for developing models, validating your models, and calculating key performance metrics
when I’ve interviewed candidates in the past, most will have a plethora of coding languages on their resume, but I’m only really looking for them to have a good grasp of SQL and Python if they have those on their resume. the thing that is harder to teach is the probability and machine learning theory
I hope I answered your question, sorry I probably wrote too much, but I enjoyed answering, thanks :)