[abought]

Some departments are starting to hire programmers. There's an effort to define this as a (broad) job category under the heading "Research Software Engineer":

https://society-rse.org/ https://us-rse.org/

Institutional support varies widely; some projects or teams are rather well funded for big projects and senior talent, while at other schools, the cost structure is more aimed at "one off" projects staffed by more recent graduates.

A recent grant is trying to fund this work at several schools with a history of well organized services: https://www.schmidtfutures.org/our-work-old/virtual-institut...

[mike_hearn]

That's been around for a while but the pay for these roles is very uncompetitive, and universities don't care if professors don't do it. It doesn't make any difference to whether you get published or not so it'll probably remain niche.

Now, if journals start rejecting papers because the code isn't provided or because it was provided but professional software engineers reviewed it and gave it a thumbs down, that'd change. But journals struggle to keep obviously AI generated material out of their pages, so they aren't going to do anything like that.

[abought]

It depends. Some of the foundation-funded positions are competitive, and a few centers have surprisingly professional leadership. People are trying to organize, and- even if it's an uphill climb- there's been some improvement at the edges.

Anecdotally, some of the RSE leads I've spoken to are seeing more long-term demand than they predicted, which might lead to more room for senior roles. Currently quite a few teams (outside the big centers) seem to be priced way too low, usually explained as because they're testing the waters.... so "cheap student labor" and "one off project" is what they can afford.

Minor heretical aside: one thing I miss about old twitter is that academia was developing a real "second layer" on top of journals, where things like reproducibility could be discussed publicly. PubPeer is a partial solution, as are GitHub issues... if enough gatekeepy people really see value in code quality, norms will shift with or without mandates.

[mike_hearn]

What's different about current Twitter/X in that regard? I see reproducibility and other science problems discussed there sometimes.

[abought]

A lot of the audience fragmented for various reasons, and even within the same discipline, not everyone has converged in a new place yet. I'm told mastodon got more CS/phys science people, and Bluesky got more social scientists. That's a shifting landscape though.

There was one obvious place to look for these discussions; now there are many. Changes to search tools and API access didn't help discoverability either.

Some of the departures are for practical reasons: Twitter regularly changes the rules around logged-in viewing, direct links, and promotion/ordering of posts in ways that create friction for people trying to engage in public outreach. ("this method worked yesterday" should refer to the software, not the communication, thank you very much!)

[DonHopkins]

Possibly something about the way women and blacks and jews and gays and trans people and other minorities are being regularly and systematically and reproducibly attacked and harassed by neo-nazis and MAGA trolls who Elon Musk retweets and supports instead of discourages and bans that turns academics off from Twitter/X.

[jltsiren]

Research software engineers are paid what they are worth. Typically a bit more than a postdoc, but not that much more. The problem is that the academia is a cash-starved environment, and everyone's work is worth much less than similar work in the industry.

Another problem is the PI-centric model. Most of the funding goes to individual labs. If a typical grant is $200k/year, you are not going to pay competitive salaries. And you're probably not going to hire a software engineer, because then you won't have anyone doing the actual research.

[abought]

I think that's the rationale behind organizing separate teams as service organizations (mini contractors who serve multiple PIs).

Other option is research "centers" with multiple PIs. Not an option for most fields, but a few, like bioinformatics, can justify both the cost and the shared employee.