> You might be conflating software graduate students with research developers I'm not conflating. The vast majority of research software is written by grad stu

> You might be conflating software graduate students with research developers I'm not conflating. The vast majority of research software is written by grad students. > why do so many professional research developers also suck as writing comprehensible code? Because incentives aren't aligned. And it's not even clear they should be aligned. > There absolutely exist research developers who write very high quality software... In reality - a lot of research developers are simply incompetent There absolutely exist software developers who write very high quality software... In reality - a lot of software developers are simply incompetent. > If people were able to investigate the underlying source code, that would be fairly apparent... Own it 1. A huge amount of research software is open-sourced and does work as advertised. 2. You don't get it both ways. Either no open source demands, or no expectation that grad students should "own their work" -- and then making demands that they literally don't own their work.