In my experience there are lots of things in academia that would be improved by someone writing software, but even below market rate there often isn’t any money for it. Funding agencies are (at least in the US) weirdly uninterested in funding software development unless it’s done by someone with the title “grad student” or perhaps “postdoc”. That’s not to say opportunities don’t exist, but the market failure goes deeper than being unwilling to pay market rate.
I think this might be an overstatement. It’s true that NSF tends not to fund developers, but in ML the NSF is only one of many funders (lots of faculty have grants from industry partnerships, for instance).
Ah this is a good point! I’m thinking more of physics, which has much more centralized funding provided by a few actors (and where I see tons of low-hanging fruit if only some full-time SWE’s could be hired). In other fields YMMV.
In my experience there are lots of things in academia that would be improved by someone writing software, but even below market rate there often isn’t any money for it. Funding agencies are (at least in the US) weirdly uninterested in funding software development unless it’s done by someone with the title “grad student” or perhaps “postdoc”. That’s not to say opportunities don’t exist, but the market failure goes deeper than being unwilling to pay market rate.
I think this might be an overstatement. It’s true that NSF tends not to fund developers, but in ML the NSF is only one of many funders (lots of faculty have grants from industry partnerships, for instance).
Ah this is a good point! I’m thinking more of physics, which has much more centralized funding provided by a few actors (and where I see tons of low-hanging fruit if only some full-time SWE’s could be hired). In other fields YMMV.