My observation is that modern machine learning research entails so many additional moving parts (most, but not all of them, involving around SWE) that any student with skills in this area is already an asset. However, these skills are typically ignored while hiring.
I have seen the scenario you describe, but I it is definitely not what I intended to put a finger on in this post. Thanks for pointing this out!
Then you must tell them that when they do “non-core-work“ they are essentially wasting their time; at least if they intend to stay in academia.
Sure there is some technical housekeeping necessary to get research done and papers written. But it must be kept to an absolute minimum.
It is nice to have students who polish the web site or set up CI on GitHub. But these students will almost certainly have fewer research results to show at the end of their PhD, compared to their officemates who just focus 100% on their research.
I don’t like it either but it’s the painful truth. I’ve seen way too many PhD students wasting their time doing incredibly valuable work for the lab but failing to publish their own work. It‘s the responsibility of the PI to make it absolutely clear to those students what is happening and that they should focus on a career outside academia if they enjoy doing such things.
However, I find it somehow weird that we only ever measure success along one axis. Moreover, these students often serve as facilitators, making it easier for others to finish projects. Navigating this precarious space is not an easy task for me, I admit that.
But honestly, your options are very limited, especially in Germany. You cannot pay them more, and you also cannot offer them a permanent employment contract. Most of the time it’s even hard to extend an existing contract. You can perhaps send them to nice conferences, but then you would send the principal author to the conference, too.
But I totally agree that academia fails at rewarding people who facilitate the work of others. There is some perversion to this, since the key part of academia is precisely to spread and exchange knowledge.
In this light it is funny to see that in many universities (especially in Germany) teaching is not valued much for career progression.
What you’re describing is glue work[1].
Until recently, glue work tended to be invisible and unappreciated across a good majority of the industry. While it’s starting to get visibility, there still isn’t consensus on how to recognize it and/or reward it.
> But I totally agree that academia fails at rewarding people who facilitate the work of others. There is some perversion to this, since the key part of academia is precisely to spread and exchange knowledge.
Yes. I saw quite a few talented people turn the backs on a career in academia for exactly this reason.
> In this light it is funny to see that in many universities (especially in Germany) teaching is not valued much for career progression.
Also yes---but that part is at least changing a little bit (even though the predominant thinking is still 'Yeah, who cares?') in the younger generation of PIs.
Things are changing extremely slowly in academia. It’s always the old faculty that decides who becomes new faculty, and their decisions tend to be very conservative. What’s worse, I have seen very progressive young PIs become complacent and conservative once they had tenure. I wouldn’t bet on academia changing its tenure criteria.
That's what I am worried about in myself, having seen this in others as well. I'll try to be more introspective.
> I wouldn’t bet on academia changing its tenure criteria.
No, I am not doing that either, but in this case, there's always the 'War Games' games response: 'A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.'
And this may depend where in Europe, but they get paid more than in the US, and also tend to get full benefits.
At least those that I knew in Denmark/Belgium were. They were not even classified as students, but as full time employees. Doing PhD research was their job.
On the one hand, you recognize in your article that "non-core" work is not rewarded in academia. In particular, however, the situation is dire for current PhD students. Getting into a PhD program is easy compared to getting an academic job (even - or especially - in the EU) with at least some job security. Further, you probably know that most PhDs lack the knowledge, experience and ability to accurately judge their chances on the future job market with any accuracy.
On the other hand, your replies indicate that you are following the "traditional" European research hierarchy, where the PhD student does years of "non-core" work for the Professor, ultimately ends up with less publications. This leads to issues competing internationally, a chain of short term contracts, post-docs or adjunct positions and finally, many leaving academia (or at least the EU). Which, by the way, is a real problem.
In European academia, we are all aware of these traditional hierarchical sentiments. At each university, there are stories about the Professor who said something like: "Your first research ideas belong to me", or Professors who actively resist the establishment of a stipend-based PhD program with the argument that "Someone (the PhDs) has to do the work at the institute!".
Now, there are probably countries that do better than others. Your state might mandate that PhD students get a salary and benefits, but all that is worth little if they end up in a bad condition after 3-6 years of doing their PhD.
And here, your reply here worries me. No, you do not hire PhDs to *work* for you. You hire them to train them to be researchers and to collaborate on that. Next to publishing and teaching, as a Professor, you are responsible for enabling these PhD students to have a successful career. More than in any other career, it is YOU, the advisor, who ends up making or breaking the future of a human being.
The thought that PhDs are merely hired workers who have to work through "menial, non core" work before they are allowed to get to their research, is one of the main reasons why academic research in the EU is doing so badly compared to other regions in the world.
In the interest of your future PhD students, I implore you to consider how much impact you really have on their lives!
I am not sure where you are getting this from. My intent is only to point out that there is more to consider than publication output. I will try to make this position more precise.
I again want to stress at this point that I do not want to hire students to perform non-core work; this is not what I wrote in the article and I am certainly not advocating for that because it is exploitation (almost of the form 'trading a PhD for years of programming'). My point is that modern research has some non-core aspects, and in my experience, these are ignore by the PIs insofar as they are expected to be performed, but they will not be rewarded or recognised.
> On the other hand, your replies indicate that you are following the "traditional" European research hierarchy, where the PhD student does years of "non-core" work for the Professor, ultimately ends up with less publications. This leads to issues competing internationally, a chain of short term contracts, post-docs or adjunct positions and finally, many leaving academia (or at least the EU). Which, by the way, is a real problem.
Fully agree with you that it's a problem. But in my experience, we cannot get around the fact that ML research is certainly helped by good SWE skills. Now there are people that like these sort of aspects more than others; and my point is that they can also help to enrich a team, even though---if just seen through the lens of publication output---they might seem less strong.
> In European academia, we are all aware of these traditional hierarchical sentiments. At each university, there are stories about the Professor who said something like: "Your first research ideas belong to me", or Professors who actively resist the establishment of a stipend-based PhD program with the argument that "Someone (the PhDs) has to do the work at the institute!".
Agreed, but I have to emphasise that I am not talk about doing work for the institute or for maintaining lab infrastructure. I realise how one could arrive at this impression, but this is far from my original intent. I wanted to point out that hiring someone with a more generalist skill set and mindset can enrich a research time _just as well_ as hiring someone with a more expert mindset.
> And here, your reply here worries me. No, you do not hire PhDs to work for you. You hire them to train them to be researchers and to collaborate on that. Next to publishing and teaching, as a Professor, you are responsible for enabling these PhD students to have a successful career. More than in any other career, it is YOU, the advisor, who ends up making or breaking the future of a human being.
If I could rephrase this in my own terms, I would also state that I hire them to work with me, to collaborate with me. I also agree that I should enable them to have a successful career---regardless of where they choose to work in the end.
> The thought that PhDs are merely hired workers who have to work through "menial, non core" work before they are allowed to get to their research, is one of the main reasons why academic research in the EU is doing so badly compared to other regions in the world.
Fully agree with you here, but this is not what I wrote at all. A PhD student is foremost a budding researcher. My point is that it makes sense to consider their skill sets in a more holistic fashion when hiring them.
> In the interest of your future PhD students, I implore you to consider how much impact you really have on their lives!
I am keenly aware of this responsibility. I realise that my points above might have been misconstrued, but please understand that I have foremost their interests in mind. It is disheartening to see how my more generalist friends who are doing their PhDs are not recognised at all in academia. _This_, IMO, is also some form of 'brain drain' that could be avoided.
(And yes, I spent time on logos, websites, and whatnot that never make it into papers: it all adds up and you never really know what is ok to drop until after the fact. More so, the paper is the worst form of result and better as just a stepping stone, IMO: a paper is the failure to do anything more meaningful & expansive, like a community of practice or company.)
> reviewers assume they know best.
You are probably more adept at running a grant-funded research group than me. I have no doubt. My concern here is ethical. I do think the average PI is in waaaay too deep to admit how horrible even the "good" PIs end up treating their phd students. So, in that sense, I do generally assume I know best. Not about how to do successful research. But about the true reality of how the people in those salt mines are being treated.
On that note: of course all that non-core work is valuable! Incredibly valuable! And PIs should probably hire someone to do that work! At fair market wages! With accurate job titles and job descriptions!
I agree with everything you're saying... except about who should do the labor and what they should be paid for that labor.
I'm going to reiterate two sentences from my original post.
>> Want a devops engineer? Hire a devops engineer ("systems scientist" or so on). Want a graphic designer? Hire a graphic designer.
>>> ‘I’m a researcher, not a(n) X,’ with X∈ {software developer, designer, marketing person, artist, …}
>> Sure, but here's the rub. What does everything in that set have in common? They make at least 2x+ the average PhD student and have much better benefits.
>> If you want a "force multiplier" person in your lab, do your job: get a grant and pay a fair price for that sort of labor. PhD students are NOT ∈ {software developer, designer, marketing person, artist, …}. If they were, you'd be paying quite a bit more and/or getting far less exceptional candidates.
Labs that have successful spin-offs are usually the worst about this sort of thing. They're running their research lab like a seedling incubator, but paying each of the one man shops printing their lottery tickets low five figures without retirement benefits.
If you want to go ethical -
* PhD students, most of all, are learning how to do R&D: picking valuable problems, picking how to solve them, and most efficiently in time/money/etc solving then. Doing scrappy Day 1 work is very much a part of that skillset, surprisingly similar to a founding MVP team: Not My Job is teaching the wrong mindset and divorces you from the community + work, which may be what you are trying to learn.
* ... However, Learning to Outsource/delegate is indeed part of efficiency training, so let's dig in. The default answer in most prototyping is do a crappy cheapo version, replace with a more costly version when it becomes the need, and reserve your shoestring budget for a few really important things. So likely no to a commercial grade design firm on rerainer, yes to either a $50 logo on Fiverr or more likely, something funny you can make via a free tool, done. Later, when there is more need and budget, say Year 2, easy to revisit.
* Some things do merit staff. Should a bio lab partner with a CS team who wants to learn their needs as part of making new CS methods? That's T-shaped collaboration and good, and part of why academic teams can be so scrappy: there's ~always someone somewhere where your non-core work is their baby. Or, maybe they want to inhouse to get more speed/reliability/control. If that person will be like the CS team, ultimately making new CS methods, or a more computationally minded bio researcher helping with some of their own coding for faster EDA, great. But if they will always be Author #2 and has to code on projects they are not doing the science on, that's not a postdoc, that's a staff programmer. We should have more of those.
Ex: My wife's lab had paid staff, but she still had to feed cell cultures at 1am for the research she wanted to do, and later decided those methods were not for her and no longer does wetlab projects. That doesn't invalidate people still doing cell cultures as part of their methods, and I'd still love to see more robots & no-code & budget there to make it easier.
Edit: RE:products,
Whoosh. Academically derived products at that scale imply a community of practice and development: societal impact and dedicated makers growing it, including more knowledge. That should have the level of respect that a paper that opens up a small subfield gets. From a norms perspective, it's disappointing to see what sounds like a practicing academic to not value that. Separately, again, community of practice work values being embedded, so a student not enjoying it is their personal methods choice, not rules for others.
You're promoting both a super traditional view yet also one that seems divorced from the last ~100 years of sociology studies wrt how society progresses wrt inventions and how people fit into that. So, it's great you follow old beliefs handed down by generations of giants from much earlier ages -- there's clearly precedent -- and I encourage you to learn about new ones from the last few generation of scientists who took a more scientific method to learning how recent progress often works. These methods are not for everyone, but it's useful to at least know about them before calling the techniques of your peers 'cancer'. Personally, as technology keeps speeding up, I expect this to become even more important, but at the same time, do value head-in-the-sand research too ;-)
Also, to be clear: I am not rejecting the scientific method here. Products, and more importantly, the communities of practice around them, have a lot to do with hypothesis generation, methods, and evaluation. Most industrial labs, and ironically, especially ones that force researchers to embed into existing internal product teams, put a lot of hand cuffs on this process so academic env helps. It does take humility and empathy and time to incorporate them, so not so easy (kind of like startup-lite), but it is a family of tools and one aimed at more intentional progress.
And no, 'products' is not synonymous with financial motivation: most OSS projects have no paid piece, for example.
PS: And upon writing this comment, I had the epiphany that 'pushing out papers' might indeed be the primary objective for some. :-|
Yes, of course they do. The whole point is that this type of labor is valuable.
> if your goal is to build something that people actually want to use, as opposed to just pushing out papers.
Neither of those things is the purpose of a phd...
If a student's goal is to build something that people actually want to use, they are much better served by taking an industry position in a product group.
> pushing out papers
From my perspective, the obsession with publishing is just another version of the same problem.
Startups are kind of like that, but still quite different because VC/P&L/growth/sales still warp things. (And PhD programs are great places to experiment before that jump, as the learning & investigation can take an unknown amount of time.)
Agreed, I should have phrased that better. Fundamentally, the focus should be on 'generating new knowledge,' right?
> From my perspective, the obsession with publishing is just another version of the same problem.
Yes. :(
Some biology students and postdocs have described to me an antagonistic relationship to the funder or PI goals where they dismiss their responsibilities for data quality and reuse. For them, it isn't on the critical path to their paper and their career. Or, having data in disarray is, in their minds, giving them an edge to not be "scooped" in the lab. These cynical attitudes are almost subversive, in how the junior worker tries to evade or sabotage aspects of their job responsibility which do not serve them personally. I also see some who seem to engage in magical thinking, as if some other staff or informatician should come by later and clean up their mess of data, without the researcher putting in the effort. I often wonder whether they really misunderstand the problem so severely, or merely use this fig leaf to avoid feelings of shame.
I know that lines should be drawn between different roles, but there are inappropriate expectations on both ends of a spectrum. PIs should not treat junior researchers like assistants to get coffee, run personal errands, etc. But neither should junior researchers believe that the day to day grind of the scientific process is beneath them. At the scales that most labs work, there are many essential yet mundane tasks that need to be shouldered by "core" participants. The overhead of trying to delegate these tasks to a different person would either require more time than doing the task oneself, or result in abysmal quality when the hand-off is made with insufficient supporting effort.
I think that people exposed to the pop culture of startups and large corporations can absorb a mistaken idea of how easily human organizations scale. With vast numbers of skilled staff, you can create processes which scale beyond the capabilities of a typical small lab or group. These tend to develop lots of specialized roles to support that process. But, I think there is a huge inflection point between the efficient small group and the scalable large organization, where the marginal value of adding another staff member can be very small, or even negative. Many (most?) grant-funded research groups exist only because they can function in that small team mode, with relatively thin budgets and the need to wear many hats.
The only safe way to scale work under these grants is what we see already: schools expand to have additional PIs running their own small, independent labs. These eventually compete with each other almost as much as they compete with outside labs. From the host school, they get actual "non-core" services like building facilities, human resources, payroll, contracts and legal support, etc. But, no one group can really scale to have more staff and specialization focused on a single research effort. There is a reason that "big science" projects are few and far between and are mired in much more politics---the granting agencies have to be motivated to write different kinds of funding opportunity to bootstrap such projects and to continue their operation. The budgets and timelines are vastly different.
It's why many PhDs can't get jobs in teams like mine - they don't have the skills of people with lesser degrees, and while we're not against training new candidates, we don't want to pay them large sums of money when the guy who just had a BS degree came in with all these skills.
They can also learn them quite fast before the interview/job, and it's a concern that they don't, when almost all other applicants do.
This isn't about skills development. It's about using people who already have these skills as engineering support labor for the research group while paying then 1/2 to 1/5th of what they'd make in industry doing equivalent work (that, again, they already know how to do!)
But I think there’s also a basic misunderstanding about what a T-shaped individual is and why they are sought after outside academia. It’s not because they can do a bit of everything, setting up the build system with one hand and designing the logo with the other. (That’s more what you’d call a jack of all trades.)
The reason T-shaped individuals are sought after in industry is that they are effective leaders. They understand enough about the problem domain(s) to identify meaningful problems and enough about the solution domain to help map out the solution space.
The reason you’d want more T-shaped people in machine learning research is that they will ask better research questions, not because they’ll design prettier logos.
> The reason you’d want more T-shaped people in machine learning research is that they will ask better research questions, not because they’ll design prettier logos.
Author here---fully agree with you. Man, that example with the logos is going to haunt me now...I just did not want to bog down the article with too many technical details. Of course there's immense value in moving between disciplines...that's a whole other discussion to be had (because IMO, academia does not necessarily have the right incentives for this either; research between disciplines X and Y often tends to be dismissed as being 'not enough X for Y' or 'not enough Y for X')
I read some anger and disenchantment in your comment. Feel free to reach out in order to get another perspective on your situation. In any case, without knowing the specifics of your situation, and being a more or less anonymous internet stranger providing unsolicited advice, I would suggest you don't do anything hasty. Getting a PhD can be useful in certain domains; at the same time, if you are not engaged and---dare I say it---happy with your overall situation, it might be time to move on.
Whatever you do: the world is big and, with a little bit of luck and foresight, there are additional opportunities to be found! Best of luck to you :-)
I do feel anger sometimes, but after all they're pleasant folks to work with, and I feel I shouldn't blame them just because they're born in richer places than me. I'd probably still finish my PhD :) But I do admire your resolution to become a professor, as I have been nothing but impatient with teaching other people things I understand. Your blog does have many insights that are rare in academia, with so many people rushing to get more papers published. I hope you'd have a successful career as a professor.
I come from a non-academic background myself (although being born in Europe certainly simplified things...I am mentoring students from India, for instance, and was shocked to learn about the high cost of even applying somewhere---but that's a different story), and have the feeling that academia is closed off against these sort of backgrounds. Despite academics trying very hard to think of themselves as being 'heterodox' and 'challenging the status quo,' most just follow along with the system. I don't want to assume a self-aggrandising position and believe that I alone can change the system, but maybe I can point out some issues at least...
(and thanks a lot for your kind words!)
There are good points already mentioned. I can add if you hire one person to write unit tests, another for graphics, another for models... then you suffer the overhead of coordinating them. Also, pure research work is often repetitive and drudgery, so being able to come up with cool logo or working on "uninteresting and unexceptional" tools that can be shared with other researchers can maintain the motivation.
Author here--thanks, that's a cool way of putting it! (plus, working on such tools, for instance, should be recognised by PIs in an ideal world)
Sure, for example, it's a waste to have a newly minted PhD set up CI systems. However, it's more of a waste to have them blocked waiting on someone else and then beholden to someone else every time there's an issue.
Researchers that can drop into the technology stack are great productivity multipliers for themselves and for their peers.
Academic types do their students a disservice when neglecting the development of such skills. Not everyone lands a professorship.
Also, didn't a bunch of these ML folks get undergrad CS degrees? Why should they be unable to do undergrad CS tasks?
This isn't about skills development. It's about using people who already have these skills as engineering support labor for the research group while paying then 1/2 to 1/5th of what they'd make in industry doing equivalent work (that, again, they already know how to do!)
I am saying that every student should be doing these tasks. The students without these skills should be learning them too.
Then no one is being taken advantage of. Then all of the students are more marketable. These skills are useful to academics too: successful junior faculty will one day need to stand up their own labs with their technical skills.
For one, the main benefit of a funded Ph.D. is that you don’t pay tuition. That’s a huge benefit that can total $40k or more per year before candidacy.
Secondly, you (should) get to travel and present your research around the world for free. During my Ph.D. I got to present our work in Portugal, Chicago, and Japan, all expenses paid. That’s not nothing for a young aspiring researcher, and not something my friends in industry got to do at 24.
Also, one thing that a lot of people don't know is that grad students in the USA don't have to pay FICA taxes on their stipends or their tuition remission. That also has to be figured in when comparing compensation.
No one does a phd for the coursework :)
> travel
This is worth perhaps $2K-$4K. Your industry friends could easily travel the world, and they wouldn't be stuck in a conference hotel for half their trip.
> FICA taxes
No! This isn't a good thing!!!
The employer pays half of these, and paying them entitles you to the US social safety net! Universities don't even give phd students the minimal benefits that every other employer in the entire country is required to subsidize 50%.
Stated another way: Denying any other employee a 50% match on state-provided retirement/disability insurance/unemployment insurance/medicare/etc. would literally be criminal.
Tuition also entitles you to access library resources, university software, campus gyms, sports facilities, child care, and university provided health services. I think your emoticon is implying your statement is tongue in cheek, but I mean.... they absolutely do though. If you don't consider taking courses a benefit to doing a Ph.D. then yeah, the value proposition of a Ph.D. program is quite lopsided. Tax-free tuition is an amazing benefit from my perspective.
> Your industry friends could easily travel the world, and they wouldn't be stuck in a conference hotel for half their trip.
You say stuck at a conference hotel, but I love conferences. They are so much fun and I always learn so much and meet amazing people. Moreover, what I said was "travel and present research". Not many employees who have been working for 1-2 years out of college get to present their work in front of an audience of peers and experts. It's great exposure and an amazing way to make connections and start building a career. My friends in industry were never given opportunities like that.
> paying them entitles you to the US social safety net!
I mean, you start paying into them soon enough -- I'm not really worried about my social security payout when I retire because I didn't pay into FICA when I was 24. The benefit of not paying FICA is that $30k goes further now when you need it. With Obamacare, healthcare isn't much of an issue anymore for grad students, and we got cheap/free healthcare at the university health services.
Look, all I'm saying is that when you say "$30k with marginal benefits" it makes it sound like a grad student is being compensated as a fast food employee. It's more like: $30k, and there are all kinds of benefits which may or may not appeal to you as an individual. If you want to make a ton of money go into industry. If you want a different experience do a Ph.D. You will (should!) come out of it with an education and a lot of open doors, some of which are permanently locked or vastly harder to open without the Ph.D. degree.
I know Ph.D. students who made almost six figures by doing highly paid research internships. Some advisors only care about demos, while others care about startups, and yet others care about how the work is presented to funding agencies. I know Ph.D. students who did most of their Ph.D. in a completely different city than their degree-granting institution. I know Ph.D. students who were highly pressured to publish, and Ph.D. students who had no pressure to publish. I know Ph.D. students who basically had no advisor, and Ph.D. students with 3 world-expert advisors. Some Ph.D. students are funded by the university, others are funded by large collaborative grants, or by their own fellowships, and yet others are funded by small industry grants their advisor got.
It's like if threads about being a software developer had comments like "at tech companies, you only get rewarded for closing tickets."
It would definitely be cheaper for my research group to outsource this work onto non-research staff.
Author here! I realise that my point is a little bit misunderstood. I am not saying 'Ah, let the PhD students do it.' I am saying that these sort of aspects should be recognised and rewarded, potentially influencing hiring decisions (for instance, hiring an SWE role instead of a Ph.D. student to fully support the lab).
Not necessarily an opportunity cost. Often they are paid in a more valuable commodity, i.e. visas.
But I'm writing from the perspective a grant reviewer. Systematically abusing immigrant labor.... well, it isn't exactly a more charitable interpretation. So, from my perspective, a bit of a moot point :)
(There's also OPT, btw, which is critical in the process, and H1B lottery chance, assuming a US Masters degree, was more than 50% last time I looked at it a couple years ago. O1 (and even EB1A/B) are not that rare for well-published PhDs, and EB2-NIW is quite easy for any PhD worth their salt, I'd say.)
You can master-out in the middle of a PhD program, which is frowned upon, but it is difficult to get funding if you directly apply for a masters degree.
Perhaps the solution is to decrease the negative cultural backlash against predisposed intention of leaving with a masters despite applying for a PhD, which is currently seen as some sort of betrayal of the adviser if you are going to have your grad students do boring work. It'll be a win-win deal in that case.
When I was in school, one applied to "MS/PhD" programs most typically. And all imaginable variants existed in terms of funding and likelihood of leaving with only a MS. Some schools would fund no one till they finish the MS stage, and others would fund everyone from the beginning (just give every accepted student a full fellowship for the first couple years). And also some schools were pretty notorious for kicking people out at the end of the MS stage, with a difficult exam at this step or not enough advisors to take them on for the PhD.
One positive side, though, is if you wash out of a PhD program at any later stage, you at least walked away with a Master's.
I actively advise students against joining labs like this and consider the whole enterprise unethical. I raise concerns whenever I'm reviewing grant proposals by folks who run their labs like this. I've successful nuked funding proposals because the work plan included language like this.
Want a devops engineer? Hire a devops engineer ("systems scientist" or so on). Want a graphic designer? Hire a graphic designer.
But DO NOT lie to impressionable youth by telling them that you are admitting them into a PhD program to be your apprentice on a research project and then proceed to pay them $30K/yr (with marginal benefits) for uninteresting and unexceptional engineering and design work. They are taking a huge financial opportunity cost to work on uniquely high leverage problems. Maintaining your research group's build system is not what they signed up for.
> ‘I’m a researcher, not a(n) X,’ with X∈ {software developer, designer, marketing person, artist, …}
Sure, but here's the rub. What does everything in that set have in common? They make at least 2x+ the average PhD student and have much better benefits.
If you want a "force multiplier" person in your lab, do your job: get a grant and pay a fair price for that sort of labor. PhD students are NOT ∈ {software developer, designer, marketing person, artist, …}. If they were, you'd be paying quite a bit more and/or getting far less exceptional candidates.