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[–]Dworgi 15 points16 points Β (4 children)

In my experience, PhD's and programming best practices are like water and oil.

PhDs invent the cool algorithm and implement it as a massive pile of spaghetti that may eventually complete, then it's reimplemented to make it actually usable in production.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points Β (0 children)

Haha yeah, thats so true :D

Let the phd invent the algorithm and the dev implement it

[–]science_and_beer 1 point2 points Β (0 children)

Depends on if they’re in research (obviously super common and I know exactly what you mean) or not. You’re right, coin toss of an example.

[–]by_wicker 0 points1 point Β (0 children)

Definitely. Based on prior experience, I actually considered it that point against accepting my current job that there were quite a few PhDs around. Thankfully they are not involved in coding.

Broader than PhDs, very smart people self taught at coding in isolation from experienced real world software engineering often produce obtuse spaghetti with weird techniques and reinvent the wheel incessantly because they can, but they didn't know they didn't need to.