[lewis500]

I agree I would recommend industry to almost everyone. In fact, engineers ask me about grad school several times per year and I almost always discourage them. Too many people think of grad school as sort of a vague "next step" that will "open doors" or else a way of "leveling up" as though life is an RPG and a grad degree is a special badge or skin you can get. I encourage them rather to think concretely about what academia specifically entails: reading abstruse papers, writing papers with little chance of being appreciated, debugging software, writing grants, giving presentations, etc. Academia is only appropriate for a rare type of person, like being a classical musician.

[goalieca]

I really love research but here I am stuck in a coding job. I tried my shake at academia but I got depressed at the lack of stability. I wanted to start having a life but there was just no stability in any of it. It's hard to plan long term when you're always 6-12 months away from having your income dry up.

Moral of the story: there's always someone willing to sacrifice more than you whether its their health, money, life, ethics, whatever.

[mattkrause]

Along with the personal cost, this instability can't be great for producing good science either. My lab has learned and lost some techniques over and over again, as people churn through.

If it were up to me, I'd convert some MS/PhD slots into staff scientist roles with longer contracts. I think you could probably do this in a way that increases productivity, and makes more people more happy to boot.

[james-mcelwain]

One of my friends who is a graduate student complains about the difficulty of collaborating with other scientists who lack strong coding skills. They are so focused on the science that there's no time to learn or practice good code hygiene.

If often wondered why labs don't hire regular developers to increase research veliocity. I have no interest in research, but would happily work in the context of academia doing thing like handling merges, ensuring code modularity, maintaining infrastructure, writing unit tests, etc.

[mattkrause]

This has become a little more common lately, but probably still not as common as it should be.

Part of the problem is funding. You can get 3-4 grad students or ~2 postdocs for the price of a developer. Plus there are lots of existing mechanisms for funding them: training grants, internal and external fellowships, working as a TA, etc. A developer would have to get paid out of research funding, which is already pretty limited. The National Cancer Institute had a program for staff scientists, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative just launched one targeting microscopy, but there aren’t tons of options, especially not for open-ended roles.

There’s been some adverse selection too. I briefly had a programmer but it rapidly became obvious he was working for an academic salary because no one else in their right m8ns would pay him more. I ended up rewriting all of that code, and despite this, my boss keeps sending me fresh-faced undergrads “to do the coding.” I guess the idea that you get what you pay for hasn’t sunk in yet. That said, we’ve also had a few that were excellent and were interested in the projects; I think they were both hired as part of some complicated arrangement where their spouses were recruited for more traditional academic roles.

Another part of it is that code quality hasn’t been a huge priority. That is finally starting to change, but most labs have a lot of code that was unceremoniously promoted from “one-off prototype” to “critical infrastructure” without too many changes. (This, incidentally, gives the lie to peoples’ obsession with YAGNI).

Finally, if anyone does need a neuro/ML themed developer, I call dibs :-) Seriously though, I completely agree that we have have more specialized roles (dev, technical writer/editor) and I think that whatever place manages to make this work could become a research powerhouse. Some of the bigger institutes (the Broad, Janlia Farms, etc) do have some jobs like this already.

[i_am_proteus]

Some labs do this! I've seen places where the ratio of engineers to grad students and postdocs was about 1:1. The engineers were salaried and could take courses at the university if they chose to (for free, but on their own time).

[mattkrause]

Tell me more, please! (Especially if they’re hiring)

[i_am_proteus]

A common thread was that these were labs that were joint between the university and a UARC or FFRDC. Academic grant funding doesn't usually include engineers, only PI and students, but FFRDC/UARC funding is different. So look at Johns Hopkins/APL, Penn State/ARL, Georgia Tech/GTRI, then (very importantly) look for labs run by a PI with a faculty appointment at the university.

A friend of mine worked at Hopkins for a few years, did interesting stuff, and walked out with a (free) MS afterwards.

[p10_user]

The majority of academic labs do not have the resources to offer the high salaries skilled coders demand and can easily get elsewhere.

And academic research often just needs to be “good enough” for that next paper or grant. Investing lots of time and people into code quality isn’t worthwhile unlesss your whole goal of the lab is to provide software as your output (there are a few, like the Wikipathways group). Bht for everyone else, the ROI is too low, better off working on the next grant or manuscript.

[mattkrause]

That’s definitely the perception, though I’m not sure how true it actually is. A battle-tested analysis pipeline or experimental control suite is a huge competitive advantage for a lab.

The catch is that it needs to both evolve and stay solid at the same time: it’s hard to predict what you’re going to want in three years—-or find the time to clean up code from the last three years, especially since many of those folks will have moved on.

[rrishi]

It is an advantage but not crucial for grants/papers etc.

[ambicapter]

> Too many people think of grad school as sort of a vague "next step" that will "open doors" or else a way of "leveling up" as though life is an RPG and a grad degree is a special badge or skin you can get.

I have a Masters, and all the interesting jobs I want to do are held by PhDs (sometimes with a couple years of postdocs). And everyone who's on that team has a PhD and they're definitely not going to let anyone lesser than that onto their team.

[cortesoft]

Can I ask what field you are in? I work in software, and many of my colleagues have PhDs... and many of my colleagues never went to college.

They all seem to get along fine, and the ones who have PhDs are usually playing down their credentials.

[wpasc]

I can't speak for the person to whom your replying, but at any big tech company doing anything with recommendations, machine learning, etc. will have teams where having a PhD is huge especially when being considered for promotions

[ambicapter]

In software, not at a FAANG, but in ecommerce.