[clmcleod]

I think your phrase here sums up how many people feel:

> why would I choose to work at an organization that respects my craft so little they haven't bothered to maintain their software for a decade

This is changing in my experience, albeit slowly. And really, this is what I'm calling on us, as a community, to do better on.

The reason you _would_ work at these organizations is because (1) the subject-matter is really interesting, (2) there are hard problems to be solved, and (3) you wake up every morning knowing that you are working on something that will have an impact on the lives of people around the world.

At least those are my reasons :)

[cjbgkagh]

I charge a high rate not because I need the money but because I need to stop people from wasting my time. I’ve worked at these places before where they exploit your altruism and dedication to craft to extract more work out of you for less. Concretely one of the places refused to hire a frontend dev to help so I got stuck wasting time churning frontends. Charging more encourages them not to do that.

[fnbr]

Yeah. It’s one thing if the only way the job is worse is in pay, it my experience has been that if the pay is significantly worse, the job is worse off in every way.

[cratermoon]

I have experience working in academia. I started out working for a medical school in fact, on bioinformatics. It's been a while, so I have kind of forgotten the problems, but I'll do my best.

1. Academic code. Not one institution would pass the Joel Test[1]. You pretty much covered some key points in your first paragraph, so I see not much has changed. The best predictor of how something will perform in the future is how it has performed in the past. Just hiring good software engineers won't change the system in which they work.

2. Academic bureaucracy & administration. I've worked for large Fortune 500 companies with less byzantine org charts. I've been matrix-managed. The siloing in academia is crazy.

3. Advancement. Because it's academia, advanced degrees are everything. My first boss in academia had a PhD. His job? He ran the student computing lab. My second boss was an MD/PhD. Great guy, but treated everyone like a lab assistant. I went to graduate school for one year and realized it wasn't for me.

4. (added after reading other comments). Completely unrealistic understanding of what developing robust, complex software is like. You touched on this by mentioning how many projects have 1 maintainer. I remember seeing a doctor shopping around his project plan. I'd say it would be a challenge for a high-performing 5-person team. He thought it was a job for a single entry-level programmer.

1 https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

[pclmulqdq]

If you don't have a PhD, don't touch academic jobs with a 10 foot pole. They all got one, and they value the credential to a ridiculous degree.

When I last worked with academia, they essentially thought of me as the same as the guy who maintains the lab equipment, not an actual collaborator on their research.

[cjbgkagh]

The academic elitism doesn’t end at PhD. A friend asked a Nobel prize winner their thoughts of different person who was recently awarded a Nobel prize in the same field. Their response “Ah, yes that was one of the lesser Nobels”

[RangerScience]

I think what I'd ask is:

Will I be allowed to fix the parts that result in

> an organization that respects my craft so little

Like, it's one thing if they haven't - that can be fine, it's just more work. It's an entirely different thing if they won't.

[clmcleod]

I think the honest answer is, it depends where you work. Where I work, we have that autonomy. But we also have leadership that understands and respects the software engineering craft.

[rleigh]

How are we "as a community" going to be able to improve this?

It's ultimately down to the cultural norms of the field, as well as the realities of academic funding.

I was a research software engineer (RSE) for the best part of a decade. The best thing that happened to me was being made redundant when my funding ran out, and being forced to work in industry. What a difference (and wholly for the better).

The reasons you give are all nice positives, but they all ultimately are very emotionally manipulative. You're asking people to act against their own self-interest. But this isn't really for the benefit of humanity. It's for the benefit of the PIs who run the research groups, and keeping their little empires running. But the cost to the individual is great. You're sacrificing salary, a career track, advancing your own skills to the full, and in many cases the opportunity to have a life: being able to afford a home and support a family.

In retrospect I, and many others like me, do feel that we were taken advantage of to some degree.

I spent several years on a massive grant, then several years on lots of small short-term grants (12 months, 6 months, 3 months). You can't risk getting a mortgage when you have no guaranteed employment. And it's also very stressful not knowing if you'll be employed in three months time every three months. And unlike in a company, RSEs don't really have a proper career track. There's no real progression. You're a hired help.

RSEs are not treated equally with academics. Let's be really honest about that. We're not. I even had a PhD in the subject area and you're still beneath all of the "real" academics. We're not "partners" in their work. We're the dogsbody's.

If these people want software developers with real chops to work in the field then they need to pay a competitive salary, have a proper career track, and really fix the job stability. And they also need to properly respect the expertise RSEs bring. Unless all of those are fixed, a career in industry will continue to be the only rational choice.

This won't happen though. Tenured academics refuse to consider paying the going rate because that would mean the "hired help" would be earning considerably more than they do. I had already topped out the salary band when I left, and I was earning more than most of the junior-mid-career academics. They are, of course, on fairly poor salaries. They too would earn vastly more in industry, but are mostly unwilling to consider that option as a rule. Their loss. If they truly respected the value they were getting, then they would pay for it. It will not happen though. Most of academia is about climbing the greasy pole and not about advancing the state of the art; there's just no way they'll permit others to sit higher on the salary pyramid than they do.

At least in industry skill and competence and the ability to deliver are highly-valued, and companies will gladly pay for people who are proven to deliver. In practice the work I do in industry (biomedical) has far more positive impact upon the world than anything I did in the academic niche I used to occupy, and is also vastly more enjoyable, with a lot more responsibility and technical depth.

Are you personally planning to stick it out for the whole of your career? Because if I could give you the advice I would have liked to have given myself, it's that you should properly think about where you want your career to go in the medium to long term, and decide when (not if, but when) you will exit to move to industry. Use it as an opportunity to gain some useful skills, and move on to where your skills will be properly valued.

[bombolo]

I've seen a posted phd position that was extremely weak academically, because they just wanted someone with a CS degree to implement their pre-existing ideas, but didn't want to pay a developer's salary.

The position kept being posted multiple times over a couple of years. Then I moved on and don't know what happened.

[zachthewf]

How's the startup ecosystem?

[chitowneats]

Ever since the pandemic, many software engineers have become exactly the type of "I've got mine, Jack" people they typically deride.

[jwilber]

Or, and hear me out here for a second, people go where they’re most valued. Why would someone volunteer to go work somewhere where they’ll get less money, have less flexibility, be treated as second-class employees, have less work perks, etc. when so many alternatives exist? Doubly so in this economy.

Maybe genetic companies should catch up in workplace etiquette instead of recommending that SWE’s lower their expectations.

[cratermoon]

> be treated as second-class employees

The pay isn't all that important to me, as long as I can live on it, but this. It was so obvious when I was working in academia that because I wasn't myself an academic that I was just lab help, no better than the person who washes the test tubes and beakers.

[cycomanic]

I don't quite understand this post. In my experience lab technicians in academia are highly valued (however I mostly have experience with clean room staff), however they are support for the researchers, who drive the research agenda (well actually it's the funding primarily). What exactly do you expect to not be what you call "a second class citizen"?

[rleigh]

Are you really, really serious?

Academia is a hugely elitist pyramid with well-demarcated layers, and the lab technicians are at the very lowest level of the pecking order, down with the cleaning staff.

They might be "needed", but by and large are they really "well respected" or "valued"? Not really, sad to say.

[clmcleod]

I agree. With that said, I do think we are getting there. The pay is becoming more comparable, and I think software engineers are becoming more and more valued in these companies/organizations.

[jghn]

At least one of the entities on that list is a nonprofit academic institution. Expecting pay equal to the standard software industry is misguided.

Whether or not that's a tradeoff you're willing to make is another question.

[tikhonj]

The problem is that it isn't just about pay, it's about everything: autonomy, flexibility, culture, work quality, respect... If an organization can reliably convince—show, not tell—that it will be a much better place to work overall, I'm certain they can hire highly skilled engineers even if they can't compete on pay.

My experience is that most non-tech organizations can't or won't.

[nine_k]

If you go to academia, you're certainly are not going for the money.

People can work for less if they are visibly valued, or where they are doing some heroic stuff that appeals to them personally.

People can for some time withstand being treated as second class, being overworked, etc, if they are paid a lot.

But if it's neither, why would anyone bother?

[jghn]

> But if it's neither, why would anyone bother?

Because they find it rewarding in some other way? I agree that that way is not the conventional wisdom, but it exists, it turns out that some people value doing things that provide a demonstrable benefit to humanity.

Also he second class citizen thing has diminished over the years. It still exists but there are plenty of companies where that's no longer true. This is in stark contrast to when the field was getting off the ground, for instance it wasn't uncommon for benefits like PTO to be tied to your degree level & not length of employment.

[zach_garwood]

And three of them are FAANG. They could certainly afford it.

[jghn]

And they pay their standard rates.

[zach_garwood]

Haha, thanks! This is much kinder than my response was going to be.