[joshvm]

Yeah let me be clear. PhD students absolutely should get guidance from experienced engineers (so I was a bit over-zealous with "assist" in my parent post). But this should be more like understanding best practices, and they should feel free to ask questions and figure out how to write better code. There are initiatives to do this called Software Carpentry.[0] However, RSEs should not be writing code for students doing PhD level projects in my opinion, for exactly the reasons you mention.

I know some of the big research councils do this in the UK. For example STFC has a program where they'll work with universities and companies to production-ise research code.

> The scientist just wants to focus on their research and once they have a barely working proof of concept, hand it over to the engineer to figure the rest out. The engineer wants a well specified design and prototype that they can lightly refactor to clean up, scale up and turn into a product/tool.

As you say, this is a great idea in principle. In reality I think that it's really difficult to make it work.

[0] https://www.software.ac.uk/programmes-events/carpentries/sof...

[elementalest]

I don't think its about best practices, its about good design and communication. Even if we are just talking about PhD students, the majority of them are fresh graduates. They are no different than fresh grads in a company. Those grads work with experienced senior software engineers to guide them and provide design advice (not just best practices). Those engineers are often the ones writing the complex/difficult areas of code.

> RSEs should not be writing code for students doing PhD level projects in my opinion

So should a mechanical engineer PhD be designing and making all their own robot parts? Or should the shop engineer help them? The few mechanical engineer PhD's in robotics I know made a few early prototype test parts themselves with help from the shop engineer, but the shop engineer made and even helped design most of it, especially the final prototype.

> As you say, this is a great idea in principle. In reality I think that it's really difficult to make it work.

The point I'm making is that it does work and its proven to work very well (which is why the major industry labs do it). In my experience its Academia that doesn't like it. Anything which appears to take power/freedom away from scientists and gets in the road of their research is rejected. Though I think the core reason is (as other comments have mentioned), there is no incentive for Academia to make it work. The funny thing is that having a RSE working with them would actually help the scientists in the long run and allow them to focus more on the research because they wouldn't have to do everything themselves.

[joshvm]

> I don't think its about best practices, its about good design and communication.

I would argue these should be included in best practices for software engineering.

> So should a mechanical engineer PhD be designing and making all their own robot parts? Or should the shop engineer help them? The few mechanical engineer PhD's in robotics I know made a few early prototype test parts themselves with help from the shop engineer, but the shop engineer made and even helped design most of it, especially the final prototype.

This is an interesting example. Every mechanical engineer I know has huge respect for their in-house machine shops. Everyone has a story about some design they submitted for fabrication, only to be told by the machinist that their design was terrible and they should do it another way. Generally machining jobs are very well-defined though, you have to submit CAD documents, tolerances etc.

The shops in universities I've worked in have a strong incentive to help people optimise designs because they're the ones doing the manufacturing, and they know what sort of things will work and what won't. But by and large this is informal. Usually this comes in the form of "have you thought about designing this another way, because this is really difficult/expensive/time-consuming to machine". Maybe this is just a cultural thing for machinists?

The PhD question - if your project is to design a new type of part then you should probably do the design. Should you make it though? It depends if the project is specifically looking at fabrication. Otherwise it's normal to dispatch this to a workshop.

In my opinion, it comes down to what your PhD is training you for or what you're hired to do as a postdoc. If your job is data analysis, then I think you should be writing code, but you should be able to get guidance and support. If you're a field biologist with no coding experience and you want to develop an app to take measurements, then that's a case when contracting it out to an in-house development team makes sense. I'm not saying it can't work, but the make in making it work is important.

If you incentivize RSE's properly then their time will become expensive and we need ways of figuring out how to maximise their impact.

[Azrael3000]

Well I think the best way would be for RSEs to maintain a project and PhDs should then contribute to that project via pull requests. RSEs can then point towards proper coding styles, test development, etc.

That would ensure that the contributions of the PhDs does not get lost and they learn how to properly contribute to a project.

[joshvm]

See my sibling comment on this. I think this is an ideal case for an RSE: if you have a shared codebase that ends up being contributed to by multiple members. That avoids legacy problems where someone contributes, leaves, someone else modifies, none of it is in source control etc. However, this assumes that you have a group that is structured around some common IP or library - and sure, there are lots of places where this applies. This is generally more mature research, not something that a PhD student has just come up with.

There are of course scenarios where someone comes up with some very high impact work, and there's an obvious need to make it robust or user-friendly, spin-out, etc.

It works less well for groups where everyone works on different or loosely related projects. That's not an efficient use of an RSE's time, in my opinion. Though of course you can have a situation where lots of people do random projects using the lab's core code. In both cases, there is a use-case where RSEs embedded in a university can train students on good coding practices.