[mjhay]

In scientific disciplines, professors and grad students just write their own code. At least that was the case in my department, other similar departments at my university, and people in my field from other universities. It's very bad code of course, but I've never heard of anyone getting hired specifically to program, besides a few CS undergrad interns being brought in. No one had anywhere near the kind of budget to hire professional programmers.

[stevenbedrick]

This is thankfully beginning to change, though far more slowly than many of us would like to see. There is much more talk about "research software engineering" happening in a lot of fields, and some funding agencies are beginning to take notice. Anecdotally, I know of a couple of PIs who have been successful in arguing for higher budget caps on R01 submissions in order to cover the costs of having appropriate computational staff on their grants, which is something that I never would have believed if somebody had told me about it ten years go. And some fields (like computational biology) have been ahead of the game in this regard.

It remains a huge challenge from a budgeting standpoint, though, I don't want to downplay that too much. And there are also other challenges- until very recently, my university didn't have job categories for software-related research staff roles, and so we had enormous difficulties figuring out how to hire and appropriately pay such people. The "how do we hire them" part has been fixed, which is a big help- but we still have to figure out how to pay for them ourselves.

[131012]

And when it becomes a huge challenge from a budgeting standpoint, you need appropriate administrative staff to figure this out.