[garmaine]

I actually strongly disagree with the message in the lead-in. All scientists can “code” better than OP can do science, yes, but most woefully lack any software engineering experience. Most postdoc research code would earn a failing grade from an undergraduate software engineering professor, or get themselves fired from a real world programming job. Think spaghetti code, lack of testing or continuous integration, non compliance with standards, etc.

I would say a cheap win for a coder would be to attack some domain where only rough research code exists and make it more reliable, scalable, better documented, interoperable, etc. a complete rewrite is probably required in many cases, but you have the working old version to compare against.

[patrick5415]

> or get themselves fired from a real world programming job. Think spaghetti code, lack of testing or continuous integration, non compliance with standards, etc.

Perhaps, but doing all those things would get them fired from the job they are currently in.