This seems at odds with the statement from the article

"There needs to be a real shift in mindset away from worrying about how to get published in Nature and towards thinking about how to reward work that will be useful to the wider community."

EDIT: What the heck is wrong with this? We have two opinions on the perceived value of programmers in scientific enterprises, one from someone who works in the field (David Gavaghan) and another from Zed Shaw. I'm highlighting that Zed's perception is not universally agreed upon.

get published in Nature = food on the table

useful to the wider community = warm fuzzy feeling

Ideally you'd get both, but if it's one or the other, for most people a full belly wins.

This sentence strikes me as astonishingly hypocritical. Nature can immediately do 2 things to make the science they publish vastly more useful to the wider community:

1) Remove the paywall

2) Require publishing the code for computational papers (and the data for experimental papers)

Nature Group only cares about maintaining its status as a high impact factor journal, and scientists sheepishly submit to them. They actually love it that scientists worry about getting published in Nature.

Dont feel too bad. HN has become full of people who believe that the correct response to something they disagree with is to mod down, instead of to reply with a rebuttal. It sucks, but others will mod you up.

My experience is while they may be respected, they aren't paid. And I'm not a charity.

Nobody is paid for doing research. The salary of a professor is about 1/3-1/5 of what the same person may get in industry. People who do research don't do it for the money.

Yeah, but you know who gets even more screwed, salary-wise, than the professor? I'll tell you who: their lab techs and staff scientists ("research associates"), and that most definitely includes the "programmer who knows some science".

Furthermore, at least at my institution, being the "programmer who knows some science" means that your position is entirely funded with "soft money", which means that your level of job security can be pretty low.

I agree with your point, but I'd add the modifier that if you're a top-notch developer who forms an interest in a specific sub-discipline in science (my field is genomics, but there are many others where this would be equally applicable), there is certainly huge potential to carve out a niche and make a big name for yourself in your chosen field (as long as you take the science side as seriously as the coding side). Then you certainly could make big money, as Shaw implies and as you'd surmise from reading the linked article.

Everyone thinks they're underpaid, but the truth is, academic skills do not transfer well to industry. I refer you to the discussion in Ghostbusters:

"Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."

That's fair, but you know what those professors get? Tenure. ie not getting fired unless they're caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl. And they typically get paid with hard money as stevenbedrick notes.