we are struggling with the following: there's a few people in the world whose domain expertise we need (e.g. 5y in an academic lab working on a particular topic that requires wet-lab, hardware and computational bio expertise) but who mostly happen to be pretty bad at SWE. The intersection of domain expertise required and good SWE skills unfortunately seems to be 0 in some cases.

We're now considering two options: 1. hire the person and train them up to be a good SWE 2. hire a decent SWE with outstanding drive and intellect to pick up the domain expertise

1. seems more achievable because the resources required to train someone up are lower than sending 2. into a wet lab and have them fuck things up for half a year.

I wonder if anyone has experience with this situation and advice/stories to share.

Ty!