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My stories are very minor. I did my PhD in a reasonably well regarded mechanical engineering lab. My area is experimental fluid mechanics. I ended up writing a
by knolan 5y ago
My stories are very minor. I did my PhD in a reasonably well regarded mechanical engineering lab. My area is experimental fluid mechanics. I ended up writing a lot of Matlab code while there and even worked with a spin out company from the lab in the biotech sector for a while.
I'd get a lot of other students coming to me for coding help. Most just wanted me to do their job for them and I was too naive to say no. One wanted to count cells in a microfluidic device using image processing. I sat down with them for a couple of hours and walked them through a few methods they could look into to get started collecting all the examples in a script. Basic stuff so they wouldn't feel overwhelmed. A few months later I see he published my simple introduction as a paper with zero modifications. He had the good grace to at least thank me in the acknowledgments.
Several years later while working a $BIG_TECH lab we interviewed a candidate from my old lab. They presented their work and had performed some data analysis of thermal camera images. Turns out they were using a script I'd written there and it was still actively used to work with the thermal camera. Nobody ever modified or improved the code — many engineering students are terrified of code. I was annoyed because there was no interest in further development the code, I don't think they even read it or understood it.
While at the spinout company I developed a software tool for the PCR optofluidics platform that was being developed. It was considerably faster and more robust than the hacked together script they were using before and had a user friendly UI that I build with feedback from the biologists on the team. A few years later the founder and one of their new students published a paper documenting their amazing tool without any reference or acknowledgment whatsoever. That one pissed me off.
There is a lot of ignorance around code authorship and respect for the developer in physical sciences research. Like I said, many are terrified by code but don't value the time and expertise it requires; once they have it they no longer think about its maintenance or acknowledging the author.
- knolan 5y agoJust remembered another recent one. A couple of years after I had left, my former employer closed the regional site. I saw the writing on the wall I guess. A few colleagues from there have set up a new consultancy company, they’re going to build demos as a service apparently. Several of the showcases on their website are my work.
- stdbrouw 5y ago> I'd get a lot of other students coming to me for coding help. Most just wanted me to do their job for them and I was too naive to say no. One wanted to count cells in a microfluidic device using image processing. I sat down with them for a couple of hours and walked them through a few methods they could look into to get started collecting all the examples in a script. Basic stuff so they wouldn't feel overwhelmed. A few months later I see he published my simple introduction as a paper with zero modifications. He had the good grace to at least thank me in the acknowledgments. That can't be the whole story, surely? You verbally suggested a couple of possibilities for what might work and wrote down a couple of lines of code, and then I imagine the student tried out all of those possibilities and reported what did and didn't work? I mean, what academic journal would want to publish half-working examples with unstudied properties? Mind you, I agree about your broader point that (especially in academia) a lot of people don't really understand and respect code authorship.
- erosenbe0 5y agoIMO, academia is not better or worse -- often they do apply their citation culture to code. The overall problem is that people tend to think only in terms of first order consequences. A little copying here and there might have minimal financial or reputational risk. But the second order consequences of that becoming the example and the norm for the junior ranks and the next generation causes larger organizational risk. So got to consider the bigger picture and nip the ethical lapses immediately.
- knolan 5y agoI’ve checked the paper again and there is also some basic CFD analysis performed by a third author. He had some sample images he had taken and I used them to demonstrate the basic code. The figures in the paper are the ones I generated in my sample code.
- sleepydog 5y agoI think it is very common for code to outlast its authors in academia for non-CS/EE fields, where programming is seen more as a means to an end rather than its own pursuit. For example, my wife in her Psych PhD inherited a giant hairball of Matlab code for interfacing with an eye tracker and scripting various experiments. She made her own modifications, and I helped too. The last we heard, the code is still being used. There are likely dozens of copies of it under various names, with sections commented out or added to the end. I'm sorry to hear about you not getting credit, that's inexcusable, in the same way that not accrediting the researchers who did the work in a paper or book (I have heard this story too often) is inexcusable.
- technofiend 5y agoI had a friend who worked at Compaq on tools that did desktop imaging. There was one tool he used that had a big splash screen when it started naming the author. Everyone was in awe of that guy so he used the cachet of people knowing his name to move on to bigger and better roles. My friend decided to see if he could replicate that success and when he wrote the next version of the tool he too had a big splash screen with his name up front. Sure enough it worked and for a certain subset of everyone, everyone at Compaq knew his name and he too was able to move on to what he considered a better role. There were a couple of downsides; he got calls for years after asking for help with the tool, and one boss seemed envious which led to other issues.