[quadruplebond]

Potentially your "rival groups" will have a long term advantage now though. This might be bad for the graduate students that did the work, but could be good for the professor and group over the next decade.

Graduate students need to think in terms of 4-6 years while forward looking professors might want to think in terms of 5-15 years.

[thicknavyrain]

I do wonder about this a little, but so far I haven't seen anything implemented elsewhere in my field that hasn't been possible to do with our existing code. In fact, I have spent a fair bit of my time replicating others' results with our code and getting sub-percent level agreement.

However, I guess one drawback is that a lot of the things we currently implement are all written from scratch (for very standard things such as numerical differentiation and parameter optimisation), which has the advantage of having "control" and more understanfing over the code, but less time saving/potentially not as efficient as using pre-existing libraries.

[quadruplebond]

I agree, it is very project/field dependent. There are times when a painful redesign might pay off in the future, but I am sure there are also times when it is a waste of effort. In your case a redesign might have been a waste, you are in the best position to judge this.

[ryanpepper]

I use Python for most things and write C extensions which can use OpenMP or CUDA and which are hooked in via Cython for the slow parts. Find this works well, although it can lead to you duplicating things unnecessarily sometimes (needing a C function to be callable by Python requires you to write a wrapper for it).

[PascLeRasc]

That was without a doubt pretty bad for those grad students' careers. That kind of work shouldn't have been done by anyone without tenure.

[thicknavyrain]

I might actually disagree on this one. If it was the first year of their PhD, then yes, it does seem like grunt work which is dissatisfying, but they will have fully learned the ins and outs of their group's code framework.

In the process, they would have understood nearly every approach taken by the group towards producing the results that it does, and I bet that has helped them when they've ended up modifying that same code later for their research. And with fewer supervisor meetings to work out exactly what X, Y and Z part of the code does because they will have worked on it themselves.

I'd say I've easily spent 6 months just spending time getting my head around all the code we work with anyway, so at the very least, I hope that made their following years of research more productive.

[robotresearcher]

Or you could spend the time reading the papers of many groups.

[quadruplebond]

Not necessarily. It was definitely bad if they want to become academics and needed to publish papers. But if they knew from the start what they were getting into and wanted to transition from physics to software development then it might not have been so bad (although there might have been a more optimal path).

A bad advisor wouldn't care what his students wanted, but a good advisor might still have students work on this kind of project as long as they were aware it wasn't going to help them get a tenure track position in the future. If they wanted to go work at a national lab doing HPC work and programing it might have been plenty ok for their career (This is what I am transitioning to now) or if they want to go work for a hedge fund or apple it might also be an okay option.

[dagw]

I don't know. Having "rewrote X kloc of scientific Fortran to modern idiomatic C++" on your CV should get you to the head of the line in many places when looking for a job.

[roel_v]

Only if you go after run of the mill coding jobs after your phd, in which case why bother at all. When applying for a postdoc, you'll very much want to bury that part of your work.

[cocoablazing]

Plenty of high-paying quantitative jobs requires such a degree and experience. The majority of phd’s don’t go on to support their family with a tenure-track academic salary.

[dagw]

Or you could be applying for a HPC research job in one of the countless non-university setting that also does that sort of thing. Then having both a relevant PhD and some relevant hands on experience will be extremely helpful.

[0xbear]

Why would you rewrite something that works well instead of just linking to it?

[quadruplebond]

Because you need to modify or extend it in some nontrivial way.