The skilset is similar maybe, but putting it in practice is something else. In your claim you skipped the part where the scientist used his skills to become good enough to design a good program. As long as that learning process didn't happen, and that takes time, he/she will not be good enough. As such I know excellent scientists which are known and praised in their field and come up with inventive designs. Yet their code to do something as simple as plotting a histogram is a mess.
This is not remotely true, to the point that I don't even understand how you could assert it. What skills taught to physicists or chemists or biologists are even related to notions like modularity and data abstraction?
Hell, I've seen people come out of computer science PhD programs with poor software engineering skills and habits. If CS programs don't reliably teach these things, how can you claim researchers in other fields automatically have them?
