> As with most other kinds of software, the biologists should be treated as customers (or trained up to be skilled-enough engineers), as it is done in other disciplines. To create good accounting software you also wouldn't propose to have the accountant write the initial version of the software, would you?
Accounting is a bit different, because it has already been invented. There are standards and best practices for it. In bioinformatics, writing software is often a research activity. You write software to determine what the software should do, and then you adjust your ideas and rewrite it. The person writing the first version(s) of the software is a researcher – at least in practice if not by job title.
Accounting is not a static thing, and is also constantly changing with new legislation and financial instruments popping up. Most bioinformatics tasks nowadays are not any more "creative" in their research. Specifically in the last few years a good chunk of the research is just okayish application of ML research to their field of research.
For many specific problem sets in the natural science informatics disciplines, you can just stay up-to-date on ML trends and release a new paper that applies them every few years, in an almost automatable way.
There is a good chunk of research like that, but there is also a good chunk of research where the "biologist as a customer" model does not work. In research like that, it's the job of the person writing the software to figure out which biological problems they are trying to solve and how.
Accounting is a bit different, because it has already been invented. There are standards and best practices for it. In bioinformatics, writing software is often a research activity. You write software to determine what the software should do, and then you adjust your ideas and rewrite it. The person writing the first version(s) of the software is a researcher – at least in practice if not by job title.