I was a software engineer for ten years before going back to school for a statistics degree. In my experience, I thought very deterministically, and that really

I was a software engineer for ten years before going back to school for a statistics degree. In my experience, I thought very deterministically, and that really got in the way of interpreting the mathematical concepts that are, by definition, stochastic. Engineers think in IF statements. ML thinks in probabilities. This is a nontrivial mental barrier to overcome. It doesn’t help that a lot of engineers want to find shortcuts that involve not learning the math. That’s just more engineering thinking. Not all disciplines throw exceptions when the output is bad. Maybe there will be tools that negate this need some day. I have yet to see them.