> why would I choose to work at an organization that respects my craft so little they haven't bothered to maintain their software for a decade
This is changing in my experience, albeit slowly. And really, this is what I'm calling on us, as a community, to do better on.
The reason you _would_ work at these organizations is because (1) the subject-matter is really interesting, (2) there are hard problems to be solved, and (3) you wake up every morning knowing that you are working on something that will have an impact on the lives of people around the world.
At least those are my reasons :)
1. Academic code. Not one institution would pass the Joel Test[1]. You pretty much covered some key points in your first paragraph, so I see not much has changed. The best predictor of how something will perform in the future is how it has performed in the past. Just hiring good software engineers won't change the system in which they work.
2. Academic bureaucracy & administration. I've worked for large Fortune 500 companies with less byzantine org charts. I've been matrix-managed. The siloing in academia is crazy.
3. Advancement. Because it's academia, advanced degrees are everything. My first boss in academia had a PhD. His job? He ran the student computing lab. My second boss was an MD/PhD. Great guy, but treated everyone like a lab assistant. I went to graduate school for one year and realized it wasn't for me.
4. (added after reading other comments). Completely unrealistic understanding of what developing robust, complex software is like. You touched on this by mentioning how many projects have 1 maintainer. I remember seeing a doctor shopping around his project plan. I'd say it would be a challenge for a high-performing 5-person team. He thought it was a job for a single entry-level programmer.
1 https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
When I last worked with academia, they essentially thought of me as the same as the guy who maintains the lab equipment, not an actual collaborator on their research.
Will I be allowed to fix the parts that result in
> an organization that respects my craft so little
Like, it's one thing if they haven't - that can be fine, it's just more work. It's an entirely different thing if they won't.
It's ultimately down to the cultural norms of the field, as well as the realities of academic funding.
I was a research software engineer (RSE) for the best part of a decade. The best thing that happened to me was being made redundant when my funding ran out, and being forced to work in industry. What a difference (and wholly for the better).
The reasons you give are all nice positives, but they all ultimately are very emotionally manipulative. You're asking people to act against their own self-interest. But this isn't really for the benefit of humanity. It's for the benefit of the PIs who run the research groups, and keeping their little empires running. But the cost to the individual is great. You're sacrificing salary, a career track, advancing your own skills to the full, and in many cases the opportunity to have a life: being able to afford a home and support a family.
In retrospect I, and many others like me, do feel that we were taken advantage of to some degree.
I spent several years on a massive grant, then several years on lots of small short-term grants (12 months, 6 months, 3 months). You can't risk getting a mortgage when you have no guaranteed employment. And it's also very stressful not knowing if you'll be employed in three months time every three months. And unlike in a company, RSEs don't really have a proper career track. There's no real progression. You're a hired help.
RSEs are not treated equally with academics. Let's be really honest about that. We're not. I even had a PhD in the subject area and you're still beneath all of the "real" academics. We're not "partners" in their work. We're the dogsbody's.
If these people want software developers with real chops to work in the field then they need to pay a competitive salary, have a proper career track, and really fix the job stability. And they also need to properly respect the expertise RSEs bring. Unless all of those are fixed, a career in industry will continue to be the only rational choice.
This won't happen though. Tenured academics refuse to consider paying the going rate because that would mean the "hired help" would be earning considerably more than they do. I had already topped out the salary band when I left, and I was earning more than most of the junior-mid-career academics. They are, of course, on fairly poor salaries. They too would earn vastly more in industry, but are mostly unwilling to consider that option as a rule. Their loss. If they truly respected the value they were getting, then they would pay for it. It will not happen though. Most of academia is about climbing the greasy pole and not about advancing the state of the art; there's just no way they'll permit others to sit higher on the salary pyramid than they do.
At least in industry skill and competence and the ability to deliver are highly-valued, and companies will gladly pay for people who are proven to deliver. In practice the work I do in industry (biomedical) has far more positive impact upon the world than anything I did in the academic niche I used to occupy, and is also vastly more enjoyable, with a lot more responsibility and technical depth.
Are you personally planning to stick it out for the whole of your career? Because if I could give you the advice I would have liked to have given myself, it's that you should properly think about where you want your career to go in the medium to long term, and decide when (not if, but when) you will exit to move to industry. Use it as an opportunity to gain some useful skills, and move on to where your skills will be properly valued.
The position kept being posted multiple times over a couple of years. Then I moved on and don't know what happened.
Maybe genetic companies should catch up in workplace etiquette instead of recommending that SWE’s lower their expectations.
The pay isn't all that important to me, as long as I can live on it, but this. It was so obvious when I was working in academia that because I wasn't myself an academic that I was just lab help, no better than the person who washes the test tubes and beakers.
Whether or not that's a tradeoff you're willing to make is another question.
