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As other people have mentioned - the problem is that academia rewards producing papers, not stable software libraries. For example - scikit-learn is an amazing
by Fede_V 12y ago
As other people have mentioned - the problem is that academia rewards producing papers, not stable software libraries.
For example - scikit-learn is an amazing project, lead mostly by a small group at INRIA with Gael at the helm - and in terms of academic prestige, scikit-learn is probably 'worth less' on your CV than a couple of Nature papers.
This is of course ridiculous - scikit learn is used by a huge amount of people, it takes an insane amount of work to run the project, yet the incentives are what they are.
- saraid216 12y agoIt's just a standard consequence of underfunding. No one gets paid to develop scikit-learn full time. An academic gets paid by getting grants. When you look at a lot of the best libraries out there, how were the top contributors employed at the time? Generally speaking, you'll find that most of them were employed by companies who were willing to let them burn money to develop the library. Universities don't have that luxury anymore.
- Fede_V 12y agoThere actually are some full time developers for scikit-learn - and they are amazingly talented. There's lots of difficulties in securing that funding though. Getting funding for permanent staff is incredibly tough - usually you have 3 year contracts for 'postdocs' that pay around ~40% of what a similarly skilled software developer could earn. The only stable positions in academia are professorship - and even those are going away in favour of positions where people are expected to pay increasing portions of their salary from their grants. How can you credibly offer someone 40-50k dollars a year, with no job security, tied to some grants that might or might not be renewed and expect them to turn down offers from companies looking for data scientists?
- zo1 12y ago"How can you credibly offer someone 40-50k dollars a year, with no job security, tied to some grants that might or might not be renewed and expect them to turn down offers from companies looking for data scientists?" The same way that restaurant owners ask their servers to work for sub-minimum wage and expect them to bring that up to minimum wage via "tips"(Law mandates they bump that up to minimum wage of 7+ if tips don't cover it, but that's separate). Not entirely the same, but it's an alternate form of payment for services rendered. If you ask me, I think it's perfectly reasonable as long as there are no laws meddling and causing an increase of such "odd" remuneration schemes.
- mamoswined 12y agoI work in academia and I have job security and full benefits. I can't work on projects like this all the time though. I'm responsible for more generalized infrastructure like webservers, but when I have free time I'm welcome to work on stuff like this. I think more academic IT departments should leverage their talent like this.
- palvaro 12y ago> the problem is that academia rewards producing papers, not stable software libraries. isn't this the good thing about academia? aren't you kids getting paid the big bucks to write and maintain the software libraries, while we work on novel problems for pennies?
- Fede_V 12y agoI am an academic myself! Aside from that - it's actually a bad thing, poor software quality is incredibly harmful when trying to create reproducible research. A few people are fighting this (Titus Brown, etc) but it's mostly swimming against the tide of bad incentives.
- palvaro 12y agoI agree that this is a serious issue in our community, but I am not sure I agree that stable libraries <=> reproducible experiments.
- nitrogen 12y agoIf those experiments involve automated data collection or computer models, then stable data collection or modeling libraries would be kind of important for reproducing them.
- Fede_V 12y agoTry to reproduce the analysis published in a paper when all you have is a matlab script with one letter variable names and zero comments :)
- _delirium 12y agoIf you're running someone else's code, imo that's not reproduction in the first place, just like re-running an experiment using the original experimenter's preparations and lab apparatus is not what's usually meant by "reproducing" an experiment. Too much undocumented stuff can creep in if you don't independently reproduce, with independent apparatus, preparations of samples, etc. (I don't think having someone's code is useless, and it can be especially useful for elaborating on the original experiment, but I would purposely avoid looking at it if I were aiming for an independent reproduction.)
- IndianAstronaut 12y agoIn the middle of my PhD I got offered to work on some major Python projects. I had to turn it down since it would have hurt my already shaky PHD progress. I couldn't have used it to contribute to my degree.
- frozenport 12y ago>>'worth less' on your CV than a couple of Nature papers. Because Nature is for biologists? A couple of Nature paper's won't get you a job at Google.
- BaryonBundle 12y agoNature is also important in Physics and Astrophysics.
- Fomite 12y agoIs here where I point out that Google employees have publications in Nature?