When I ran a Data Science team we primarily hired Physicists and Mathematics majors and not CS graduates for this reason. It mostly worked as intended (untapped source of excellent candidates), but some of them could not for the life of them pick up software development / writing manageable code with a team. They were so used to writing unmanageable scripts that didn't have long-term time horizons (think: horrors of hundreds and thousands of lines of R-stats code in a single file, uncommented, and brutal to look at, with the expectation we'll just plug it into R-script on the command line) that occasionally this became a very tough habit to break.

Still, besides that issue - which all novice programmers have, but Data Scientists come in at a much more senior level - it was a great market advantage, one that I think is largely gone today, as companies understand the need for statisticians and economists who really and truly understand modeling and math.