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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Why hire an engineer? Why not walk over to the CS (might have a different name) and talk to a professor there. They can set you up with plenty of undergrads who need this experience, and they should be able to guide them into something that is maintainable long term.

Note that I said should there. How to write maintainable programs seems to be lacking in research area.

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Because undergrads are on average very bad programmers. They're both enthusiastic and don't know what they don't know. Good programmers are above all very experienced and disciplined and clear thinkers. Undergrads are stressed by their remaining workload so they have split responsibilities, and they just can't put the necessary time in.

I was such a CS undergrad working in a lab once upon a time. I don't think you really want that because the undergrad will probably only be working for like 4-15hr/week potentially for only a single semester. For a summer position, sure it's 40hr/week but still only for about 10-15 weeks.

And still, you're getting a generic CS undergrad's caliber of work and responsibility which I would say on average is not great. They might not be as familiar with version control, best practices, etc. and could just end up writing code just as bad as the scientists.

I think if hiring a team you would need at least one somewhat experienced full-time software engineer to act as team lead/PM for the other developers, whether fulltime or students.

Yeah, picking up undergrads (or even grad students) from the CS department is not a surefire way to end up code that follows best practices, is well maintained/documented, etc. and I'd probably argue if your team leader doesn't have that experience, you're more likely to end up with something that doesn't follow great practices (especially with regards to any sort of test suite).

All the replys about undergrad quality are correct. I stand by my statement though: we need to figure out how to solve this problem and research is sorely lacking.

This would be a good solution, but from what I've seen with psychologists and statisticians, it's unlikely to happen for reasons I don't fully understand. Another thing is that undergraduates often learn by adopting the norms of the institution that they're in (e.g. using version control, linters, etc) but when they're brought in as the technical person, they don't have that opportunity to improve (This is my personal anecdote as that cs undergrad at one time).

I’ve been that CS undergrad in the past who aided another department’s research, and the quality of my work back then was every bit as bad as you might expect. Of course I, like many of my CS peers, arrogantly thought I was doing great work at the time...

For sure, talented undergrad CS developers exist, but in my experience there are far fewer of them than many people might think. Experience counts for a lot, especially when trying to deliver even average quality software work.

As for something made by undergrads that is “maintainable” to a standard broadly comparable with an experienced developer? Maybe if you get lucky...

> plenty of undergrads who need this experience

The fact that they need the experience should already tell you that they're not yet competent at what they are needed for. They should be put on low-impact projects that don't matter, or low-impact projects that do matter with solid mentoring. They should not be made to write software for something that is high-impact for you with little to no mentoring.

Incidentally, this is exactly what my lab does

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