[analog31]

I'm a physicist, and got my degree in the early 90s, but maybe I can shed some light on this.

First, physics has been computation driven since the 1940s. When I was in grad school, programming was vital to my project. I wrote mountains of code, and also designed my own electronics.

Second, I noticed a weird difference between physics and engineering. Engineering students were given problems that were expected to be solved within a particular domain of engineering. A physics student might be given a problem with no idea of how to solve it, much less even how to define the problem itself clearly. That was my project. So a physics student could find themselves having to learn practically any technical skill.

Third, a matter of motivation. We knew that we would need to make ourselves employable. My project would occasionally fail in some spectacular way that would require me to learn more programming, or more electronics. Imagine that. ;-)

Fourth, possibly also as a matter of employability, math and physics people have always figured out how to worm our way into ill-defined, nascent areas of technology. These are areas that have not yet created a mainstream training pipeline, so we can plausibly claim to be as well trained as anybody. "Embedded systems" was such a field when I was finishing school.

[citation_please]

Adding onto this, every physics PhD I've talked to has really impressed me with how much problem-solving they tackled during their stint in academia. You really said it succinctly with "a physics student could find themselves having to learn practically any technical skill".

Running and extending numerical simulations with supercomputer clusters is just something you have to learn to do in order to solve your problem in some cases, apparently.