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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

My partner's partner is a scientist too. ;-)

In addition to not having budgets for programmers, we also don't know how to manage them, for instance how to communicate our needs, decide if their implementation plans make sense, or gauge their progress. Nearly half a century after The Mythical Man Month, managing software development is still generally acknowledged to be an unsolved problem.

The other two obstacles are that most programmers hate the scientific work environment, with its ever-changing requirements and frequent dead ends. And, the programmers who can work on math related stuff are in the highest demand.

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Spot on with my experience! Much of our work was helping them manage the project and figure out how to work with us. And someone went on sabbatical, and then someone dropped their program, and someone else left for another school, and someone was stuck managing the program for a semester who had literally no time or experience doing that, etc. It's a Dynamic Environment. lol.

There is no other language I have used that makes it as easy to read code from somebody else, especially where that contributor is likely to be a domain expert with very limited programming experience. It's not actually my favourite language anymore (hello Scheme!) but if you want me to do work in that environment, I'll reach for Python first.

"the programmers who can work on math related stuff are in the highest demand."

Could you suggest the best way for finding a remote job for such programmer?

Network with scientists. Doing some small jobs or favours for scientists who will tell other scientists about you is the way to go. Universities are a good source of connections.

If labs are really struggling to find math-literate programmers, I would imagine it's in part because the process for matching them with the work is so terrible. Generally speaking, skilled programmers do not want to (and certainly don't have to) shake hands and do favors to find work.

I wonder if there's any concerted effort to fix that for academia, or if the "shortage" of math-literate programmers just isn't a problem worth fixing.

That was kind of my point. What skilled programmers do to find work is one thing, what scientists, who just need some help for a short project, do to find people is another. Assuming you are a programmer who wants to do work for scientists for some reason, you need to go where they are - they won't find you in your regular tech recruiting circles, which tend to be all about full time jobs. I happen to like doing some work for scientists so that my career isn't entirely about making private equity companies richer, but I don't expect them to pay my enterprise rates or find me on Linked In.

To make matters worse, university staff software engineering jobs usually pay 1/3 to 1/2 of comparable jobs in industry (even after excluding FAANG-level outlier salaries), and in most cases offer no meaningful career progression.

I think universities will never be able to compete for engineering talent until they can create attractive career paths for people who aren't professors.

Universities will never pay competitive salaries, because academic research is not supposed to create direct monetary value to the employer. An engineer does not create enough value in the academia to justify anything approaching a competitive industry salary.

It's also ethically difficult to advocate for higher salaries in the academia, if you are already living a comfortable middle-class life. The money would ultimately come from taxes and tuition fees. If you think that those should be increased, the money would be better spent on helping your colleagues who are earning poverty-level wages.

Engineering is a support role in the academia, because pure engineers don't teach or set research directions. Most labs and most departments are too small to employ more than a handful of engineers, if any. Only large research institutes have enough engineers working on similar topics to justify creating senior engineering roles.

Anybody who wants to do this has to be willing to step off the gravy train. That sounds snarky, but it just reflects the Hard Problem of a skill that's of value in two sectors with vastly different economics.

There are people who have stepped off the gravy train because they don't like it, or they don't fit into the enterprise workplace for whatever reason. I might be one of those people. I work in industry, but in an early-stage R&D team.

Maybe the status quo is a reasonable solution: Find grad students who are willing to do the work in return for a chance to sharpen their programming skills. This process could be improved by providing scientists with training on how to write better code. The result will be a certain amount of attrition of scientists into software development jobs, but we have to get used to the idea that attrition into a more employable field is actually a good thing, and there will be plenty of scientists.

the Software Carpentry lecture group is an attempt to do this, it's pretty cool. Programming literacy workshops for scientists.

I've personally done this by finding normal work that is part time, so I can round it out doing work for scientists, artists, and musicians.

>I've personally done this by finding normal work that is part time, so I can round it out doing work for scientists

That's what I did for the first 10 years after graduating from university. Eventually I transitioned to a full time 'normal' job but that made me unhappy.

Early stage startups founded by scientists? At least that's my use case.

- get more traction

- I'm less able to focus on the software and have to focus on business development

- I'm going to need to hire someone who is a competent programmer but can also deal with the mathy bits

Yep, can confirm. Ended up doing some physics simulation work for my PhD (as a computer engineering major), my advisor constantly emphasizes that I focus on picking up the math so he doesn't have to put as much effort into explaining exactly what he wants.

It's pretty fun to do for me, but it's certainly challenging to balance with programming despite my advantage of having taken a lot of extra math classes.

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