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by meekrohprocess
1971 days ago
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Sure, the low pay is commensurate with...uh...some sort of ephemeral opportunities in the future. But seriously, you're right. Grad students do grunt work, that's how it goes. And if an academic Python2 library is widely-used, porting it is important grunt work. Surely, no serious researcher would let an important tool rot, right? |
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What is important to the grad students is to produce research papers and to fulfill their mandatory obligations (teaching, project deliverables). And most grad students, even in CS, are not professional software developers anyway. Good luck convincing capable grad student candidates to join your group to do boring software maintenance for horrible pay and no job security.
What is important to the professors, who decide what the grad students will work on, is again to produce research papers, fulfill their mandatory obligations (teaching, project deliverables) and to continually file for grants. Spending grad student time on porting and maintaining libraries does not help with that. In the worst case your grad student is spending their time maintaining a tool that a competing group's grad students are using to churn out papers, beating you to publications and grants.
What is important for the funding agencies is flashy new research in the current hot topics. I never saw a funding agency that would even consider paying a grad student, let alone a full software engineer salary, to port an academic tool from Python2 to Python3 or do all the other maintenance you need to do on production codebases---nor do most universities even have salary classes and positions for that.
As a result, in the many years I spent in academia, I saw many important research tools rot (both software and large hardware testbeds). The solution is not grad students, but to have fully paid software engineer positions in academia. But realistically that is not going to happen.