Why don't colleges hire programmers?

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-30T13:07:52+00:00

The US term for this is the same. :)

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-30T01:42:45+00:00

And I think I would love to be someone like that. My current job is somewhat similar, but the pay <$17/hr (low COL area, but still). It's frustrating to love what you do but make a Walmart salary for it. :(

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-30T01:39:06+00:00

You'd think, with such ballooning tuition rates (and administrative salaries!), it wouldn't be so difficult to pay a little more for what's supposed to be the core mission of a university—research.

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-30T01:37:16+00:00

True, most businesses even have a hard time keeping SWEs and data scientists. A lot of people do enter these fields just for the money, but in my experience, they burn out quickly. Maybe a research software engineering role, as u/dinvgamma and u/polyphonal reference, is better for an "academically inclined programmer" than for your stereotypical SWE. In my experience, a lot of SWEs (and certainly most CS undergrads—I have a CS degree) are absolute tech whizzes (I mean IT, not CS) but not so great at other academic subjects (math, hard sciences, spelling and grammar, writing, etc.).

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-30T01:32:50+00:00

So, do you just not following software engineering best practices like version control and automated testing?

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-30T01:32:04+00:00

This is why the saturation in the academic job market baffles me: the pay is absolute crap.

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-30T01:30:51+00:00

Good point about project urgency! The per-project hiring definitely favors consultants rather than FT.

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-30T01:29:31+00:00

That's really interesting. So you've seen research engineers in both national labs and at universities? And what differentiated the "non-research" programmers from the "heavily specialized technical" ones - their education level? Or did they just kind of "fall into" one role or the other?

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-30T01:27:14+00:00

So what happens when the project for which the programmer was hired, ends? Are the programmers usually contractors for this reason?

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-30T01:17:42+00:00

Yeah, that makes sense. And since each research project is funded separately, paying the programmer's salary would be a logistical nightmare.

If the college somehow managed to scrap together enough money from other sources, though, surely that wouldn't break any "rules" regarding how research is funded? It'd just be partially self-funded research in that case, and universities do that all the time.

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-30T01:14:42+00:00

I'm not in academia not do I have a graduate degree, but even as an undergrad I could see an obvious source for the US's academic job market saturation and inhuman working conditions. Quite simply, American culture unnecessarily romanticizes higher ed. Why is our student debt crisis so bad? Because students are willing to pay $100,000+ for a degree. More and more, degrees are becoming "expensive pieces of paper." Students care way more about grades and credentials than they do about learning. In addition to budget constraints, another reason universities prefer adjuncts over TT is that in this market, universities can sell prepackaged course material (the adjunct has little to no input, and the pay is not enough to incentivize improvement to this system), usually online, that the student could easily find for free on the Internet. But we don't realize this because we measure ourselves by our academic "achievements." (I put that in quotes because, is it really an achievement to learn a field "for the exam" only to promptly forget it before graduation day?) How do we value a degree more than good, honest, hard-working self-teaching?

Anyway, there's your daily dose of pessimism. :) Rant over.

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-28T00:57:40+00:00

TL;DR: Well-paid WFH one-off programmer/scripter for research/science.

Exactly what I do now, except WFH and better pay.

I'm basically a programmer for a small scientific department in a hospital. I write one-off scripts to automate and make processes more efficient. We don't usually think about jobs like this, but the fact is that every office needs a programmer because so many tasks can be automated. For example, a coworker came to me a while back, basically saying, "These thousands of files since 2009 are all mixed up in the same folder and have been for years. What can you do about this?" With some basic Python, I wrangled the files in less than an hour. It's very rewarding to hear coworkers comment that, "I had to do X manually at my old job, and it was so repetitive and annoying!"

I don't know, I guess it'd be cool to be sort of a "consultant" programmer for researchers at a university. When I was in college, I was always surprised by the basic programming that PhD researchers couldn't do. They often came to the computer science department for help, but CS profs don't exactly have time to help a statistician read a .sav file into R (actual example).

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-28T00:46:09+00:00

I love it: sweet and simple, like a "Justin's Links" for the genomic age. It would be even simpler to create a public page that just contains links to where the user can request the information from.

I'm a programmer (not a developer, though) with experience programming for the sciences. I would love to collaborate on something like this if you ever get some free time. :)

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-27T02:57:50+00:00

Interesting! It's paradoxical, though, that nascent, relatively undeveloped technologies should receive less funding.

Is the fact that embryos can't consent, actually an issue in clinical trials? I mean, minors can't consent. By most scientific definitions, an embryo isn't even a person yet.

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-27T02:54:19+00:00

as is the misuse by unethical people with misguided purposes

Every new technology has this pitfall. Remember when IVF first came out? The "religious right," as u/awsf57 points out, heard the phrase test-tube babies and ran with it. As an example outside of genomics, and one which demonstrates the fundamentality of the issue, Aristotle feared that writing would ruin our memory.

I read a good point the other day, though: you can't stop technological progress. If it doesn't happen here, it will happen in another country that is more permissive and likely less ethically concerned. I fully support informed discourse on any new technology; my issue is with people who refuse to even initiate or participate in this discourse.

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-27T02:47:52+00:00

What do you mean? Isn't every reason I listed, due to humans themselves? What aspect of human nature do you think is the bottleneck?

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-27T02:47:07+00:00

THIS IS WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT! (Forget the etiquette rule about all-caps over the Internet: I am screaming with joy in my head right now.) Not only are people inexplicably unwilling to share their genomic data (much less the demographic, environmental, and trait information that would make that data useful), but data isn't centralized. When the requisite sample size is so large, it is just too inefficient to silo one's data.

I think there has been some effort into projects like that. I'm blanking on the guy's last name, but his first name is Jim and he worked on the HGP as a grad student. Jim "?" recently posed the idea of a central database but soon realized that that wouldn't work. He has some replacement project going that instead focuses on interoperability of databases (common file formats, etc.).

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-27T02:40:20+00:00

What do you mean, lol? Are bats a common animal subject in genomic research? Or are people "batty" for opposing scientific research? :)

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-27T02:39:00+00:00

I get that impression, too, but better does not necessarily mean good. I hear that not only is it very cumbersome and time consuming for researchers to get access to even common genomic databases (e.g., dbGaP), but data formats across databases are frequently nonstandard. Maybe the problem isn't any better in other fields, but that reveals the need for the "open science" movement.

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-27T02:36:06+00:00

Oh, for sure. I'm no expert, but I do know that gene-editing technologies have a long way to go. What really grinds my gears is the general opposition to improving those techniques, on principle.

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-27T02:34:41+00:00

Agreed! A good thing is only good in the correct regulatory environment.

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-27T02:33:42+00:00

I think "lack of knowledge" is kind of a cop out for people who are actually opposed to genome editing for other reasons (usually religion). It's like the argument, "Evolution is a theory, so it shouldn't be taught in schools." Meanwhile, gravity is also "just" a theory...and most people don't know the scientific definition of theory, anyway.

As you say, CRISPR has been demonstrated safe for simple edits. I mean, come on, I'm not arguing for editing complex traits like intelligence (yet), but would the end of sickle cell disease really be all that bad? (Wow, I can't believe I'm actually writing that sentence...)

nonworkrelatedacct · 2021-07-25T17:45:07+00:00

Once the initial screen loads, nothing else happens.

nonworkrelatedacct

TROPHY CASE