Fedora and fallback DNS servers

But also the computer engineer might not realise that some of the implementation details violate the assumptions made in the mathematical proofs of Dijkstra's algorithm, so in rare edge cases their implementation fails to find a correct routing solution, and they can't understand the research paper that explains the problem precisely with six pages of algebra.

I think that's a significant challenge for Computer Science as a field - there's often a lack of connection between theory and practice. CS isn't like pure maths which can often be considered valuable in its own right; it's more like theoretical physics in that it's only successful when it gets applied to the real world. It's fine if it takes decades of speculative theoretical work before finding an application, but there should be a reasonable expectation that it will eventually find one. An unimplementable computer science concept is like an untestable physics theory - it's not really CS/physics any more, it's just an inefficient way to do maths.

But a lot of CS in academia doesn't really understand real-world computer engineering, because it's had no exposure to environments outside a university, so it fails to identify real problems that need solving; and a lot of computer engineering doesn't understand or care much about academic CS, so it keeps discovering and inventing bad fixes for problems that *have* been solved properly.

It's good for people to specialise but I think it's important to have at least some people who are comfortable with both sides, to keep them connected and working productively on the same problems. There are many cases where that is happening - see e.g. decades of programming language research which was only implemented in niche languages, while real software was written in C, but that research is now being adopted by mainstream production-quality languages thanks to people working to bridge the gap - but I suspect it's far less common than it should be.