The other problem with it is that they don't appreciate that probably more than 90% of all code (including the code that touches their ideas) is for unsexy repo

The other problem with it is that they don't appreciate that probably more than 90% of all code (including the code that touches their ideas) is for unsexy reporting purposes only. The domain expertise accounts for probably 1% to 5% of any business's code, and generally it's the easiest code to design, test, and change later on because it follows very tightly with well-worn practices in scientific computing. You might invent a great new trading strategy, but implementing it is still just the same old vector math and efficient algorithms stuff everyone's been doing for decades. But with the logging, reporting, parameter management, data provenance, data resource management, etc., etc., the actual creative design of the code matters much more, and a failure to make it extensible is way more expensive to fix down the road than tweaking some O(n^2) scientific algorithm. As an aside, this is one reason that I think algorithmic brain teasers are a really stupid thing for interviews or predicting positive business impact. With brainteasers, you are testing for rote memorization of a set of optimization techniques (data structure implementations) that maybe touches 1%-5% of your easiest-to-optimize-from-textbooks-or-wikipedia code, whereas the other 95% can almost always be assumed to rely on library implementations of these kinds of structures, and the high-level design of components, particularly optimizing it so that the addition or refactoring of features later is not expensive, is the dominant concern for adding actual business value. It's just another status game like everything else. Programming labor is asserted to be a commodity item to the company, so that managers can justify lower wage, worse working conditions, etc., for programmers than for business domain experts who are supposedly less easily replaced. But the reality is that a reasonably smart programmer can probably pick up the domain expertise to a high level, even to the same level as a Ph.D. researcher, in a short time, whereas for some reason because of some kind of status-based mental block or lack of curiosity, the domain experts seem incapable of picking up legitimate programming skills. When most of the code is for reporting, designing the reporting system is a huge priority. But when domain expertise carries political status, the importance of system design is often neglected in favor of campaigning for the supposed critical importance of the favored domain area.