[karmelapple]

> The mindset … might be fine in a research setting

A vast amount of software is written for research papers that would be useful to people other than the paper’s authors. A lot of software that is in common use by commercial teams started off in academia.

One of the major issues I see is the lack of maintenance of this software, especially given all the problems written in your post and the one above. If the software is a big ball of mud, good luck to anyone trying to come in and make a modification for their similar research paper, or commercial application.

I don’t know the answer to this, but I think additional funding to biology labs to have something like a software developer who is devoted to making sure their lab’s software follows reasonably close to software development best practices would be a great start. If it’s a full time position where they’d likely stick around for many years, some of the maintenance issues would resolve themselves, too. This software-minded person at a lab would still be there even after the biology researchers have moved on elsewhere, and this software developer could answer questions from other people interested about code written years ago.

[gyrovagueGeist]

This is the goal of the RSE field, but it's often still quite rare :(

https://us-rse.org/

[karmelapple]

That's fantastic, I haven't heard of this group before! I wish there was a lot more effort spent here.

This seems like a much better way to spend one's software development time and experience than, say, ad-tech... at least in my humble opinion :)