[Mentlo]

Having read the other comments in reply to this one (and your subsequent replies) - I believe you might be falling into a "No True Scotsman" situation.

First of - I don't know what circles you've been around, but I've not been in work collectives where either designers, UX-ers or data scientists try to insert themselves to do things instead of software engineers. If anything, in any collective I worked in, if a software engineer was to say a peep everyone would retreat like there's no tomorrow and thank god that they don't have to deal with it and the software engineer will.

Secondly - I think you are mistaking a structuring and outlining of a process with that being a mandate or an order to follow the process. When I work with software engineers, I expect them to be agile - not to follow an agile process, but to achieve the objectives of the agile manifesto - namely, to iterate ruthlessly, keep an eye on usage signals and lead with MVP's rather than over-design. Good software engineers do that, bad software engineers don't. Ultimately, I don't even judge software engineers by that - I judge them by the ability to produce results.

I think the implication of your thinking is that this is all nonsense because software engineers innately solve data science problems and design thinking problems when appropriate with appropriate methods - to which I'd reply - there's a shocking amount of software engineers who can't do anything with data and are useless in fitting a linear regression to predict something, let alone doing a Fourier transform - to which, presumably, your response would be "No true software engineer is like that". That's great, but it's not true in the real world. Same with design thinking - there's software engineers who just can't solve problems from first principles (but can, say, create a fail-proof CRUD app to automate a business process).

The real world is messy and full of people who can't structure their thoughts, or can't structure them in all domains at the least - and things like design thinking - or generalists who can be thrown at any data problem and produce something (i.e. data scientists) - are useful. They're not the best solution always, sure, and if they start being protective of territory - it's a problem - but in a normal collective that doesn't happen.

Basically - your objection can be boiled down to "generalists are shit, because they impose process on everyone, including people who understand the domain better" - which tells me more about the collectives you've worked in than the nature of those jobs. In every collective I've worked in, generalists are what you throw at an ambiguous problem to produce some results before you get domain specialists in.