[abyssin]

I have the same experience in a psychology faculty. I helped a PhD student who was working on some MATLAB code. The amount of code I had to write for something similar as they were doing was orders of magnitude lower, and faster to write. But they spent months hurting their brains and therefor thought they were doing something really smart. There was a lot of micromanagement of clueless researchers, and the consequence is that everything had to be done the exact same way as the more experienced members of the lab did previously. This was the most wasteful work organization I've seen in my life, but there was little awareness of it, compared to other state-subsidized projects.