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But surely they (or most of them) value being able to trust their data? I agree that we shouldn't ask them to be professional software developers, but then we

But surely they (or most of them) value being able to trust their data? I agree that we shouldn't ask them to be professional software developers, but then we need to provide them with access to professional developers if we want there to be such a thing as science that uses data and computing. It's ridiculous to ask untrained people to write data processing scripts if you want to be able to rely on the output. And then people wonder why we have a reproducibility crisis.

arandr0x 8y ago
Yes, absolutely. It would make sense either for funding bodies to provide ways to fund contract developers or for even smaller institutes to be required to spend a portion of their budget on full-time developers (instead of spending it all on machines and student staff). For the actual data science, as opposed to writing new software packages, it would be reasonable for students to maintain lab notebooks (except for computer experiments not wet lab ones), with exact versions of everything, exact steps, name, size and checksum of every dataset, and so on. I think things are definitely moving in that direction but this is a skill that is not beaten as much into grad students as recording wet lab work is. But in time it will be. Though, my experience in wet labs is, both quality of the lab notebooks and quality of the labeling of the stuff in the fridge definitely varies.