[dr_zoidberg]

Been there. A few years back I got a government scholarship for my PhD (which is still in progress, due to my follow up work). I basically built the foundation upon which to establish a new field for my university, and the region where I live. There are some professor who think that scholarship (and the little money it gave me) was wasted on my because I chose to build all of that from the ground up, instead of rushing through my PhD.

By the way, those of that opinion are all professors who wanted me on their labs, but I turned them down...

[yig]

For every story like this, I believe there are many more in which the student simply writes their own implementation due to not invented here syndrome or engineering as a form of procrastination.

[V1ndaar]

If you talked to me about my PhD for a few minutes you would surely put me into your "had to reinvent the wheel for no reason" category.

As indeed, I wrote an analysis framework for my data (of a gaseous detector used for axion search) [0] instead of using an existing framework used by my predecessor. However, things are always more complicated than they seem. Many of those not talked about students who rewrite stuff probably have reasons!

In my case the existing framework [1] was a monster that was bent to allow it to work with the kind of data we have in the first place. In my case my detector had several additional features, which fit _even less_ into the existing framework. It would have been a hack and still a significant amount of work to make it work well.

To be fair, when I started this I expected it to be less work than it ended up being. But that's the story of software development.

The advantages now are significant of course. I know the whole codebase. It does exactly what I want. I can extend it easily as I see fit.

That doesn't mean I didn't also partly procrastinate writing software. Far from it. Hell, there was no reason to write a freaking plotting library (a sort of port of ggplot2 for Nim) [3]. But again, this means my thesis will have plots created natively using a TikZ backend while at the same time provide links to Vega-Lite plots for each and every plot in my thesis (which of course will include the data for each plot!).

Finally, the most important point: A university / professor who only pays me for 20h a week does not get to tell me how I do my PhD.

[0]: https://github.com/Vindaar/TimepixAnalysis [1]: https://ilcsoft.desy.de/portal/software_packages/marlintpc/ [2]: https://github.com/Vindaar/ggplotnim

[dr_zoidberg]

I certainly have experienced similar things, particularly been acused of reinventing wheels. Flexibility and performance are two big reasons, but also "it's fun" or "I want to understand X" also have a good weight when we do this kind of "useless reinvention".

[dr_zoidberg]

Maybe I wasn't clear enough. When I started my PhD, I was working on leading edge, basically 3 people in my country knew that we were talking about (and I was one of them). It certainly wasn't NIH-syndrome. Still, instead of "bailing out" on the easy path (present a paper here, work with that professor in That Other Thing That Doesn't Interest Me, etc) I chose to keep doing what I love.

End result so far? I'm quite respected, still one of the leading researchers in my country on my specific topic, but since I don't have a PhD (because of the aforementioned delays, and some grumpy professors actively pushing against me) I'm starting to lose access to grants and programs.

I'd still do it all again, but with a few tweaks here and there, you know hindsight always helping.

[coliveira]

Yes, it is easy to be sidetracked on writing software. Not that software is a bad thing, but research is something different.

[mratsim]

Given the current publish or perish culture, I doubt any student serious about publication can afford to waste time.