Whether it's hiring a statistician or an IT professional, it reads to me that a lot of people are hired to do work that their superiors simply don't understand (what else would they be hiring you for? :)
There's a lot of people who would think the whole point of data scientists is to look at the numbers and say, with certainty, what they see. But sometimes the numbers don't say anything, and that's what OP was talking about I think - sometimes a clear correlation just doesn't exist, at which point the person who has hired you probably thinks you're not looking hard enough, and might encourage you to 'clean the data' until you get a result with high confidence.
There's a lot of people who would think the whole point of data scientists is to look at the numbers and say, with certainty, what they see. But sometimes the numbers don't say anything, and that's what OP was talking about I think - sometimes a clear correlation just doesn't exist, at which point the person who has hired you probably thinks you're not looking hard enough, and might encourage you to 'clean the data' until you get a result with high confidence.