There’s a lot of startups purporting to bring hard science to market but most of them are incompetent or snake oil and it’s very difficult for software engineers (or investors) to identify the diamonds in the rough with 0 domain expertise. Meanwhile many of these startups suffer from a lack of exceptional software engineering that is often necessary to solve novel cross-disciplinary problems from first principles.

It would be a boon for society if it were common for great programmers interested in hard problems to take a year off from their lucrative dead-end big tech co careers and study a subject outside of CS that they’re interested in, so at least they’d be able to evaluate the feasibility and importance of technical challenges in that field and apply their skills at a point of high leverage in that domain.