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Comment by magicbuzz | Hacker News Reader

Working in research as a software engineer can be very frustrating. I wrote the majority of the analysis code for one of the chapters of the IPCC 5th Assessment and yet was told my name couldn't be put anywhere as I wasn't a 'scientist'. I also consistently see people who have never written much code put in charge of projects where the majority of the work/research is writing software. These projects end up with no code repository use, poor quality control, zero testing, limited OO use - all the things that a professional would take for granted. Worse, they don't perceive the difference between a postdoc who can write code and a professional developer with years of experience. So they hire the cheaper option and end up with the usual 'ball of mud'.

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Some would argue that no OO use is a good thing (assuming you are referring to object oriented programming).

Expanding on this, writing research code is quite a bit different than writing production code. In particular, requirements can change quickly and drastically. This means that very open designs where you don't hide data (e.g. as is common in OO programming) are often the best designs.

> requirements can change quickly and drastically

the implication that this threat is not present for production code is completely ridiculous.

Research code is production code and should be treated as such. It doesn't matter if requirements change quickly, you still need to treat it like it's production code... you document, test, and deploy it. And you should include the ability to adapt the code to flexible requirements in your initial design.

Just because you may only use the program once doesn't mean that you can neglect good software engineering practices.

I run into bad code all of the time (some of it mine!) in our research, and it's very frustrating.

If your research code is a big ball of mud then all it's results are meaningless. And all your research should be rejected by any competent journal. Sadly, journals tend to ignore such huge issues.

But, hey it's not like reproduceable results are important in science or anything.

The more computational journals are keeping track of this. I've had a manuscript returned for revision because I didn't have enough unit testing in the code. Wet-lab journals, on the other hand, probably let a lot of stuff go on the computation and statistics than they should.

Any significant dataset should be wrapped with an object. Especially so if multiple scientists/programmers are pulling data from the dataset.

Ever tried multiple algorithm variants? Wrapping an algorithm in an object and then passing it to the data provisioning code means you can be 100% sure that the only thing that has changed in your code is the algorithm.

> I wrote the majority of the analysis code for one of the chapters of the IPCC 5th Assessment and yet was told my name couldn't be put anywhere as I wasn't a 'scientist'.

Can you be more specific about the nature of your contributions? Writing code would seem analogous to performing experiments, which alone is insufficient to warrant authorship (but should get an acknowledgment).

You raise an important question. It is important to detail the actual contribution, since programming may be perceived as purely implementing an idea with no creative input.

That said… in my career so far, I don't think I've ever seen a clean example of coding someone else's idea to spec. If you successfully take an idea from concept to working software, or if a research project requires complex software to be written, I think it is almost inevitable that the software developer will end up making a creative contribution.

I'm also a bit suspicious about the justification that you can't be listed because aren't a "scientist". Of course, I don't know the details, but it seems fishy.

Isn't this simialar to what experimental physics is. Just having an idea is different from implementing and testing it.

Sorry, I really don't know anything about experimental physics, so I couldn't comment.

eI see software development as somewhat similar to writing a novel - someone could give you an idea, a general outline, even a fairly detailed outline, but the writer who puts it into words will almost inevitably make a meaningful creative contribution.

Here's one way to think about it - if you had two different writers, or software developers, how different would the end product look?

> You raise an important question. It is important to detail the actual contribution, since programming may be perceived as purely implementing an idea with no creative input.

Beyond creative input, there's also the question of liability in case of academic misconduct. I'd question if someone acting in a technician role (say a programming professional) would have a full understanding of the manuscript and so could accept authorship; they may also lack the ability to check the findings of the manuscript which is also problematic.

> If you successfully take an idea from concept to working software, or if a research project requires complex software to be written, I think it is almost inevitable that the software developer will end up making a creative contribution.

I think we need to be careful about how we define creative contribution; there's a line to be drawn somewhere in there between a creative contribution for the sake of the software (i.e., speeding up execution time by 4x for a simulation running on a cluster) versus a creative contribution that enables the research (i.e., a novel real-time optimization algorithm for electrostimulation). The latter certainly warrants authorship, but I don't think the former does.

> I'm also a bit suspicious about the justification that you can't be listed because aren't a "scientist". Of course, I don't know the details, but it seems fishy.

Ditto, which is why I asked. My first thought was that it sounded like scholarly authorship was poorly explained and if so I was hoping to help out with that.

> I think we need to be careful about how we define creative contribution; there's a line to be drawn somewhere in there between a creative contribution for the sake of the software (i.e., speeding up execution time by 4x for a simulation running on a cluster) versus a creative contribution that enables the research (i.e., a novel real-time optimization algorithm for electrostimulation). The latter certainly warrants authorship, but I don't think the former does.

I agree, and the distinction you have made is a big part of why I consider the notion of an academic research programmer to be an intriguing idea. I think you've identified exactly the kind of innovation that isn't really recognized or rewarded through the current academic system. Your "former" example, for example, might still require a high level of innovation (perhaps a novel way of splitting up a calculation so that it can be solved in parallel on a cluster), but this innovation isn't really part of the study itself. How do you recognize this as creative work? And even if it isn't part of the study itself, what if this "solution in parallel" was an essential part of the study (i.e.., solution times without would have been so long that it wouldn't have been possible to refine the model to the point of having usable results?)

So a contribution is only a contribution if it contains an appropriate amount of NIH?

No programmer is going to going to want to work with academics, if they are forced to inject bogus novelty in order to get fair attribution for the real work.

No, a contribution only warrants scholarly authorship when it is a significant intellectual contribution to the topic of the manuscript. Short of that threshold, it appears in the acknowledgements; the acknowledgments is attribution for the work.

As geebee pointed out, current practice may not be enough to acknowledge the role of technicians, core facilities, etc. in research and the issue is ripe for discussion. Nevertheless, I don't think that changes the meaning of scholarly authorship.

Limited OO use sounds like a very good thing unless you're building a gui.

It's not "limited OO" in the sense of "well-reasoned FP instead," but rather piles of copy/pasted procedural code.

If you're not doing inheritance (which you often aren't,) a module of well-designed functions does a pretty good impression of OOP.

Does this also apply to large industrial labs, e.g. MSR, IBM Research, Google research etc.? Or are there software developers who work together with researchers in those places, perhaps resulting in better quality code?

I would expect that most of the folks working at computer company labs would write their own code and be very knowledgeable in a certain domain.

Agreed, I was just curious since some of the comments below seemed to imply that PhDs / PostDocs lack certain software development skills (although I personally haven't seen this). If so, this would either suggest that the code quality in computer company labs may be low, or they hire based on research potential AND ability to develop software

Having worked as a SWE at both pure academia (as the engineer implementing for researcher-driven projects at a university) and in a similar position at a bigCO, there is certainly more "software chops" at the latter, but the general sentiment of the research types being far more competent at research than at code is not necessarily unfair. However, the "developer presence" in these groups is much higher, (and what is expected of even the pure research folks) so it's not quite as stark as outside industry. Still a different world from the pure SWE teams, however. The intesting thought I'd add to this is that the problems don't always manifest as "bad code". Things like measuring tradeoffs and compromises are not always as well thought out in the research teams. (I'd mete this statement slightly, to say that researchers have very different mental models for what tradeoffs to make in development from someone with a pure developer background, and this is not always bad, just evident.)

Microsoft Research has RSDEs ... research software design engineers. IBM Research also has a research software engineer position, with its own career progression track. These folks are generally fantastic developers who have been professional software engineers some point in their careers. Moreover, I have never personally seen a case where a research engineer was not put on a paper for being just a coder.

It is problematic when a team of scientists collaborate with a product group (not research software engineers but regular developers). In the limited projects I've been involved in, we ask if any product group engineer wants to collaborate on a paper we are writing. No one is typically interested and we would at least add them to acknowledgements. I found product group developers were interested in collaborating for patent submissions. I definitely don't want to generalize but take this as a data point.

That makes sense, thanks

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding was that being an RSDE at MSR was still a dead-end position.

FWIW product engineers usually get bonuses for patents, so there's the obvious incentive of $5k in your pocket.

If we are talking Redmond, I've known plenty of RSDEs who have been promoted to manage their own groups. They also have the option to transfer back into a product development team, which can be very difficult for us pure researchers.

Things are changing.

Also, if you're on a patent, you get the cube (and the cash).

I made the switch from Researcher to RSDE and I'm not sure what you're talking about.

There are plenty of Principal RSDEs and some become Managers of technical leaders of teams, which sometimes even include researchers.

But of course, the track is not as clear and common as for plain Researcher or SDE (in a product team).

PS: As far as I know, the patent bonus are there for all (though I can't comment on values).

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