I agree you can self-teach a lot of it, and a lot of it isn't needed in a lot of jobs, either. I somewhat disagree on the last part. I think there's a significant amount of work in Big-Data-related areas where not having a solid knowledge of statistics greatly increases the odds of doing something completely wrongly, or interpreting the results wrongly. On the other hand, there's a significant amount of work where deep knowledge of statistics is optional at most. But companies like Palantir do seem to put a strong emphasis on the statistical background of people they hire.