[imafish]

I once worked at a consultancy that did government contracting. They had a hard time finding new software engineers to work as consultants.

So they got the idea, that they could hire other STEM Master's and PhD's, offer them an average software engineer salary and train them up to become good software engineers. Many software engineers scoffed at the idea - so you're hiring people from Physics to do web apps - pfff, what do they know about creating software?

Well, I'd say a third of my coworkers at the time were from "academia" - I felt absolutely no difference. The company is thriving and they have more than quadrupled in size since I worked there five years ago.