Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaaarrgh | Hacker News Reader

I always found that funny too. A business who needs a powerful computing solution can come up with some amazingly robust stuff, whereas science/research just buys a big mainframe and hopes it works.

View on HN

I was working in a company that had been spun out of a university until recently and it was shocking how hopeless the researchers were. I've always been critical of how poor the job security in academia is but you'd think it's still too much given how slapdash some of the crap you see is. We basically had to reinvent their product from the ground up, awful.

This is probably a naive question but isn't that the point of having developers on staff? The researchers aren't coders and vice versa, so having researchers produce prototypes that are productized by engineers makes sense to me.

Exactly! This is how it should be.

Researchers/Scientists with their hard earned PhDs should only concentrate on doing cutting-edge "researchy" stuff. It is hard enough that they should not be asked to learn all the intricacies/problems inherent in Software Development. That is the domain of a "Professional Software Engineer".

There is now in fact a new class called "Research Software Engineer" who are Software Developers working in Research developing code specific to their needs - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01516-2 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_software_engineering

I've had very similar experiences working with former researchers including at a university spinout. Mechanical rather than CS. It was perplexing how they still carried the elitism that industry was mostly for people who can't hack it in academia given the quality of their work. Would be unacceptable coming from a new hire PD engineer at Apple yet you're demanding respect because you used to lead a whole lab apparently producing rubbish?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com