[coherentpony]

Academics aren't paid to code. Academics are paid to do research.

Professional coders are paid to code.

[threatofrain]

Maybe this is unusual, but I've seen labs hire CS grad students to write their code. I always assumed this was widespread practice.

[yamalight]

That is usually done for large research projects that collaborate with industry and require high quality code (e.g. EU-funded project "HOBBIT"; https://project-hobbit.eu/)