[9dev]

Now we’re lost in metaphors. A carpenter should definitely be able to build a pergola from a rough paper sketch, and a software engineer should be able to build a machine learning system from an algorithm paper by a data scientist.

[sidlls]

That really depends on what you mean by "machine learning system." For a business, implementing some researched algorithm and essentially using a template? Sure, it's possible. The research that goes into producing the algorithm in the first place? Probably not.

There may be some classes of scientific programming which have simple enough models for a software engineer to implement. Scientific programming that relies on deep understanding of the domain and mathematical models employed to study it don't fit in that category.

[9dev]

Of course it always depends on the context. But my point still stands: a software developer is someone specialising in creating and maintaining code for an application. Any domain knowledge they may need for a particular application doesn’t matter here; their core skill set is software, whereas a scientists core skill set is active research.

Just because some scientific disciplines require extensive programming doesn’t make those scientists good software engineers: Producing an algorithm is different from generating revenue from it.