Good software development is missing from most academic promotion tracks. "Research Software Engineers" are a recently new thing, which is an admission that aca

Good software development is missing from most academic promotion tracks. "Research Software Engineers" are a recently new thing, which is an admission that academics are not very good at software engineering and supports the notion that they can't reasonably be expected to be experts in two disciplines. There is a large amount of software being written by non-software engineers (most of it is Excel) so I think it's probably constructive to say that the solution lies elsewhere other than expecting academics to become software engineers. If that sort of requirement is in place it would be hard to argue against software engineering being a chartered engineering discipline with liabilities and qualifications which would be very disruptive to a lot of the industry. It is worth remembering that academic code sharing is rare in and of itself. This reaction is likely to cause other academics to shy away from publishing their code. Perhaps giving them an opportunity to make their mistakes public so that more skilled engineers could help before the credibility of their results is used to justify drastic government policies would be better?