Programmers also suffer from the problem of no objective performance measure - there is no way to tell the difference between good programmer + hard problem and average programmer + easy problem.
Which is why many programmers don't want to make good UI's. It is a ton of technical work to get all those features working, and at the end people praise the UX designers for doing a good job creating such a good UI and not the people who coded it all together, except if it breaks then it is the programmers fault. People say the code is the easy part, but seemingly not a single big company can actually manage to get the code right, and it gets even worse at most smaller companies, so from my perspective we lack programmers who knows what they are doing way more than we lack programmers who has empathy.
No amount of empathy matters if the programmer ultimately fails to code up a working system, you'd rather have a programmer who can code up a working system with all the fancy parts needed for good UX when given proper requirements.
And if one person has had a career of spending 1 year on each research problem while the other person has had a career of spending ten minutes on each UI micro-bug? You swap the problems, and person A spends 20 minutes, person B spends half a year, and you think person A is better even though they're actually 4x worse.
Plot hole. Why did he spend 1 year on each research problem? After a year, what? A paper incorrectly proving the goal was impossible because that's what PhD's in industry say (I've seen this) so they're boss gets off their case?
No amount of empathy matters if the programmer ultimately fails to code up a working system, you'd rather have a programmer who can code up a working system with all the fancy parts needed for good UX when given proper requirements.