Coming from the other side, as a professional SWE that helps my friends in academia with reviewing/debugging their code sometimes... You're absolutely right, so

Coming from the other side, as a professional SWE that helps my friends in academia with reviewing/debugging their code sometimes... You're absolutely right, some of the most mindfucking code I've seen was from academia. Some are pretty decent and elegant but mostly it's a janky mess of FORTRAN libraries being called in weird ways, code that isn't written at all to be read later on, etc.