"that the big wins come from specialists learning to code "
I used to work at startup that did video encoding. We had tons of computer vision scientists that refused to learn decent C++ coding practices. Their stuff never worked right and they didn't really contribute much. We also had a few scientists who were decent coders and pretty much all progress came from them.
I see the same with some data scientists. They want to do pure data science and refuse to do the coding to actually get their data. So they have to be spoon fed all the time and their progress is super slow.
I used to work at startup that did video encoding. We had tons of computer vision scientists that refused to learn decent C++ coding practices. Their stuff never worked right and they didn't really contribute much. We also had a few scientists who were decent coders and pretty much all progress came from them.
I see the same with some data scientists. They want to do pure data science and refuse to do the coding to actually get their data. So they have to be spoon fed all the time and their progress is super slow.