| The basic issue is the labor. We don't pay for good science. Suppose I told you to develop good software that's novel enough to publish about, but only gave you enough budget to pay your SWEs a maximum of $30K/yr. That's one zero, for those reading quickly. Additional non-beneifts: 1. Unlike literally every other job in the country, you don't have budget to pay FICA taxes for your employees, and tax code allows this. This means your employees don't even have the USA's paltry social safety net to fall back on if they are hit by a bus or graduate into a massive recession, and their years working for you do not count toward social security or medicare retirement benefits. 2. Obviously, there is no budget for 401K retirement benefits 3. No CoL raises 4. Healthcare benefits will be paltry. 5. Your SWEs need to serve as a teaching assistant every once in a while. This likely means grading homework and a few late evenings of grading exams. No overtime for those late nights, obviously. 6. All travel, which is mandatory and often international, must be paid by the employee up front and reimbursement can take 1-3 months. We don't trust $30K/yr drones with corporate cards. Good luck making rent after a conference :) Just to reiterate: You need to hire SWEs. You pay $30K/yr (less than some Amazon warehouses!), benefits package is literally worse than a part-time gig at a supermarket or fast food joint, and your employee is expected to give you $2K-$4K loans a few times a year while living paycheck to paycheck. I just roll my eyes hard when I see complaints about garbage research code. Almost everyone in my PhD cohort had FAANG or finance offers; we were all taking 5x-10x paycuts to work on interesting problems and do science. If you want productizable research prototypes, hire PhDs to do science for you. (And I say this, for the record, as a rare PhD who during their phd wrote code that is well-documented, well-maintained, and still used by dozens of companies for business-critical processes many years later.) |