This. Any good data science person needs to understand how distributed systems work. They need to be decent at applied statistics. I think an average engineering grad can easily work with simple statistics they learn in Linear algebra and intro to ML. The good software engineering part is what has been brought on in the last few years.

I once saw some code written by a "data scientist". The overall code was non-complex, but the Java/Scala code was the worst of my nightmare. Additionally, I think other engineers have also matured enough to understand that underneath the veneer of data science, the fundamentals do not change much.