My exact thoughts. This sounds like a classic example of launching a prototype created by domain specialists (biostatisticians and bioinformaticians) as production software and skipping on the expensive stuff, like sound development practices
I don't know how many job postings ask for a software engineer who knows MATLAB, but I can't recall any
I got frustrated because my concerns that my team's development practices were causing issues on a regular basis, were ignored. I was continuously able to predict what issues we would run into, but no-one seemed to care - I even had a manager tell me, that it was good that our software was buggy, since the client would continue paying us to fix it
I've since left the biotech industry. There's a limit to how many times I want to run my head against that particular wall
- "a single 15k line C file that had been worked on for a decade" [0]
- code review of the model: [1]
- corresponding HN discussion: [2] (including sad appeals to authority: you're not an epidemiologist)
- other HN discussion [3] (including ridiculously blaming programmers for making C++ available to non-programmers)
[0] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1254872369556074496
[1] https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/