[InefficientRed]

> This perhaps says also something about the CS (versus software eng) background that most people engaging in DL publishing have.

Are those things enjoyable? Or is hacking and playing with ideas enjoyable?

Huge portions of PhD students spent time as software engineers prior to starting their programs. It's not about know-how. It's about not being paid to engineer systems in addition to doing research.

Fewer than 1 in 100 labs have dedicated software engineers, and PhD students are paid $30K/yr. There's no way in hell most of them are going to spend their time doing dependency management or setting up CI/CD pipelines for that salary. If they wanted to spend their time doing software engineering, then can (and would) move to an industry SWE job at 10x the total comp.