I'm a R&D scientist, working in industry. My work site has a full blown software department. Yet I do all of my own coding. Pay and status are not issues -- if

I'm a R&D scientist, working in industry. My work site has a full blown software department. Yet I do all of my own coding. Pay and status are not issues -- if I had a programmer working for me, they'd get paid according to industry standards. Some other issues include: 1. Knowing that software development can be a black hole. Nearly half a century after The Mythical Man Month, management of software projects remains an unsolved problem. And we're not gifted managers to begin with. When I do it myself, if nothing else, I have a pretty good sense of when it will be done. 2. What to do if there's not enough programming work for a full time programmer, and that person doesn't want to work on other things. 3. It seems like programmers with domain skills related to R&D, such as math, are in particular demand. 4. It takes a certain temperament to hang in an R&D setting. A lot of engineers just hate it: The rapidly shifting requirements, and the knowledge that something they make will only be used once, or even wrecked. The dirty secret is that the same programming work that's a step down for a commercial developer, might be a step up for a grad student or researcher who wants to learn a marketable skill. Also, a multi-disciplinary team, including people who can program as needed but also do other things, can be quite agile. My team has a software engineer, but he doesn't do very much coding for us. He has actual R&D projects of his own. Yet he can help us at a higher level, for instance giving guidance on how we can write better code, and make better use of tools. This brings us a lot of benefit without wasting his brain cells on mundane coding tasks.