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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

This is such a ridiculous comment I don't know where to start.

Are you actually proposing that being a fully experienced & knowledgeable software engineer should be a base requirement for all academic research (in any field)?

If you, working as a software engineer, were told tomorrow by your manager that you needed to perform heart surgery, and that that now fell under your responsibilities in your current role, would your argument be the same?

The private sector's typical response to the problems in the article would be to hire qualified software engineers to assist researchers. Funding dictates this is impossible, so they make do.

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> Funding dictates this is impossible, so they make do.

Put another way: software quality is not valued in academia. Let’s say the code in question was in great shape. Would it have mattered at all in the trajectory of anyone’s career? No. This is probably the one academic code base in a million that has received any negative reputational hit due to its quality.

> software quality is not valued in academia.

And in general, it shouldn't. Code written by scientists is almost always throwaway prototypes. So it absolutely doesn't matter how decoupled, or easy to extend it is. The only aspect of quality that matters here is the simplicity, in the sense "it obviously has no bugs" (and related practices like testing). This is something that could be taught, but I think it should be also addressed from the other end of the spectrum - more pressure put on verification and reproducibility of results.

It doesn't have to be decoupled or easy to extend, but it should be readable enough to ensure it does what it's supposed to, and well-tested enough to verify it does what it's supposed to.

I think Blaise Pascal's (or whoever really said it) remark is apposite here:

    If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

There's plenty of funding in academia. Come on. It's a huge segment of society, governments spend billions on it.

They don't hire software engineers to write their models because they know they can get published without that and they'd rather hire more students into their department and publish more papers. For academia to claim they can't afford to produce programs that work is absurd and damning - why should anyone believe anything in a scientific paper if this attitude is so widespread? Some people here are arguing it's ridiculous to expect academics to produce work that's correct, even putting assumptions to one side.

All it takes to fix this is multi-disciplinary teams. Of the type found in almost any industry but apparently, not academia. Why is this idea so strongly rejected by academia when it's just common sense everywhere else?

If you write software for your research then yes.

Just as I would expect you to have a solid basis in statistics, you need more than a 101-level competency in programming / software engineering if that's what you use to do your job. Same goes no matter what tools you're using, you need something beyond basic competence or advice from someone who does.

Nothing that I do day-to-day is remotely like surgery or in any way healthcare related, so that's a stupid straw man. Asking the same question of the academic _studying healthcare_ would be more apropos, but equally stupid and nonsensical.

Where in my comment did you see me proposing that "being a fully experienced & knowledgeable software engineer should be a base requirement for all academic research (in any field)"

Go back and re-read it please. I'm saying you need to be capable of using the tools for your job.

If I was working as a software engineer, I'd not be asked to perform heart surgery. A more realistic example would be a software engineer being tasked to develop software in the medical industry, where I would expect them to understand the subject matter enough to ascertain their software is not crap.

Sorry but there's a pretty big gap between understanding the domain for which your software is intended, and being qualified to work as a professional in that domain. The latter is what you're asking of academics.

I guess we are in agreement then ;)

If academics are writing predictive modelling software, I ask that they are qualified to do so.

> Where in my comment did you see me proposing that "being a fully experienced & knowledgeable software engineer should be a base requirement for all academic research (in any field)"

> I ask that they are qualified to do so.

You need to make up your mind on this one. Are you asking this or aren't you?

Being -- capable of writing quality software -- should be a base requirement for -- Anyone developing software used for academic research -- in any field -- in which the conclusions are based upon the correctness of this software.

Not all academic research depends on writing software.

> "The private sector's typical response to the problems in the article would be to hire qualified software engineers to assist researchers. Funding dictates this is impossible, so they make do."

But that is a bizarre conclusion. Is it really cheaper to let scientists focus on something they know nothing about, than to hire an expert to do it? Do you cut costs by letting scientists mop the floor, clean the toilet and guard the entrance?

> Is it really cheaper to let scientists focus on something they know nothing about, than to hire an expert to do it? Do you cut costs by letting scientists mop the floor, clean the toilet and guard the entrance?

Believe it or not, mean software engineer salaries are marginally higher than those of janitors and door security.

But easily worth it if it saves the scientist a lot of time and makes the implementation of their model more accurate and reliable.

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