This is a really good analysis. I think that as it stands, the best hope for filling these jobs is to get a highly talented postdoc who will accept this role i

This is a really good analysis. I think that as it stands, the best hope for filling these jobs is to get a highly talented postdoc who will accept this role in exchange for assistance with his or her academic career aspirations (another way to do it is more insidious, which is where a PI stretches out a doctoral student's completion time to hang on to his or her talented and cheap programmer a few more years). Of course, this means getting authorship (doesn't have to be first, but it needs to be there), recommendation letters, and so forth. It is also a temporary situation, since what is happening here is that the postdoc is doing software development for well below market rate in order to get a boost in climbing an academic career ladder. Unfortunately, this scenario makes it even less appealing for a software developer who isn't part of the academic ladder. Because they aren't getting any special boost, career-wise, it just becomes a demanding job with long hours and low pay. The setup is virtually guaranteed to result in very low quality software. Post docs may be brilliant people, but it's unlikely they will learn to write high quality, maintainable software in a transitional period between grad school and a faculty position, especially since it's something they'd like to leave behind as quickly as possible. And it's equally unlikely that someone talented at software development will stick around in an organization like this where they will never get the chance to lead a project and make a decent salary, especially when those opportunities exist outside universities. The idea of a research programmer role is a really good one but I'm not sure I can really see faculty accepting it. It would be a major cultural transition for them.