Personally I'd sooner hire someone who is expert in electrical engineering or operations research than a physicist, and I am a former physicist.
Care to expound on that? Not that I necessarily disagree with you or anything, but I'm curious.
Same useful familiarity with lapack; more practical signal processing background, system identification & etc. Also better work personalities.
This article argues that these companies want physicists to handle the abstract math and numerical programming that machine learning requires. But physicists don't have a monopoly on those skills; they are taught in plenty of engineering disciplines and applied math programs. I would even argue that as long as you can handle the math, you are better off with an education focusing on an engineering discipline so you can learn the design aspects of building large pieces of infrastructure as well.