The big thing is prestige, it takes some pretty big brains to write good, clean production infrastructure that doesn't fall over every five minutes. Those big

The big thing is prestige, it takes some pretty big brains to write good, clean production infrastructure that doesn't fall over every five minutes. Those big brains are absolutely capable of learning the math and doing the creative work of modeling. They want to do the creative work. Which means that if you create a prestige gradient and don't let your engineers do interesting things they themselves might get a paper out of, you lose good engineers and get bad engineers instead. This is also a constant problem. In DevOps and SRE, the very best devops and sre people are absolutely incredibly mercurial and mercenary - because they've been fed total lies about building systems again and again when the net job description is "hey ops person, this application I wrote is misbehaving can you do advanced troubleshooting on this server for me do I can go do leetcode".