
Why do good software people leave academia? - williamstein
http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?p=6143
======
PaulHoule
When I was in grad school (physics) at Cornell I was making Java Applets for
physics and engineering education, back when Java was in beta.

I got invited to a CS conference in Syracuse on "Java in Scientific Computing"
and did a live demo of the applets and was told I was very brave to do so --
all the actual CS people had nothing but screenshots.

In academic CS the product is papers and conference talks, not software, so
usually CS people are good at fleshing out ideas well enough to talk about
them, but they aren't good at the fit and finish work that it takes to make
real products you can hand off to other people in either industry or the
academy.

Academics in just about every other field (ex. economics, physics, biology,
sometimes even the humanities) also develop software with the goal of actually
developing software (to either do the work in some other field you are going
to write papers about or to help in education,...) but they run into the
problem that software development is not considered a core activity into their
discipline.

~~~
bachmeier
> Academics in just about every other field (ex. economics, physics, biology,
> sometimes even the humanities) also develop software with the goal of
> actually developing software (to either do the work in some other field you
> are going to write papers about or to help in education,...) but they run
> into the problem that software development is not considered a core activity
> into their discipline.

That's right. I'm an economist, and for the most part, there is no incentive
to write and share software. That's something that makes no sense to me at
all, because the biggest constraint when doing research in some areas is the
insane amount of time it takes to write computer implementations of the
necessary methods. In general, writing software is viewed as "not research"
because most economists don't understand what is involved.

This is by no means an issue of marginal importance. Take this quote from
Michael Keane[1]: "structural econometric work is just very hard to do, simply
in terms of the amount of labor involved. It often takes several years to
write just one good paper in this genre, and this poses a daunting prospect or
the young assistant professor seeking tenure, or the graduate student seeking
to finish a dissertation. Using 'simple' methods, one can write papers
quicker." Given the choice between writing papers that carry the overhead of
doing lots of programming for no benefit and writing papers that require no
programming, most economists have chosen the latter. There's a real cost to
the refusal to value software development in economics.

[1]
[https://editorialexpress.com/jrust/research/JE_Keynote_7.pdf](https://editorialexpress.com/jrust/research/JE_Keynote_7.pdf)
(page 41)

