Canada? Australia? 30% (or more) salary cut certainly applies but academic systems are similar and resources are in the same ballpark at top research universities.
A lot of trained computer scientists work primarily as engineers. Sometimes engineers do science. Sometimes scientists do engineering. In my experience it's not clear cut.
Depending on the sub field of CS, some academics do mostly engineering stuff with (hopefully) rigorous evaluations of their work, while others (HCI in particular) do a lot of formal science.
Outside of a handful places (like MSR and similar) people with computer science training generally don't participate in the production of new knowledge within the framework of the scientific method. But usually they could, if needed.
Exactly. I'm ashamed that my first reaction reading this was to blame OP. But in the 2 min it took to read the post I had come full circle to wondering what kind of terribly run company would allow this to happen--I guess the type that hires philosophy majors straight out of college without vetting their engineering skills.
Trying not to be excessively critical as building a framework like this is a big undertaking, but the aesthetics are bad, it doesn't differentiate itself, and it managed to crashed my browser. All very troubling, especially for a front-end framework.