Re:What's the point of writing good scientific software?
by michaelbarton on Friday February 08, 2013 @03:13PM
(#5189846)
I strongly agree with your statement. I am the author of the original post. I
removed a sentence stating that job search committees care about the number of
publications and citations more than they do about if your software is well
documented and has a good command line interface. I feel as a post doc I am
in a vulnerable career position and I always have to think about how 'will this
lead to a publication' before anything else.
Re:What's the point of writing good scientific software?
by plg on Friday February 08, 2013 @04:11PM
(#5190171)
I can identify with that... for better or for worse, the currency of academic (at least research-based academia in north america) today is publications in high impact peer-reviewed journals. Period. If there are exceptions they are exceedingly rare.
The most sickening part of it all is that who are the ones who perpetuate this system? It is us (other academics).
Re:What's the point of writing good scientific software?
by michaelbarton on Friday February 08, 2013 @05:02PM
(#5190387)
Exactly. There are more and more scientists entering the job market every year making funding more and more competitive. I feel like it's not enough to be good anymore you have to be really good to get funding.
What can we do to change it? I love research. Having almost 10 years of experience but still earning less than if I had gone straight into industry after a masters degree wears you down though.
I think ultimately it is because scientists add little of value to society in the short term. An MD who has a comparable number of years of education can expect to earn 10X that of an equivalent scientist because they value immediately.
Re:What's the point of writing good scientific software?
by mgillett on Friday February 08, 2013 @08:39PM
(#5191145)
This is what turns me off so much from academia. Is this really that typical at most universities? I know that there's always been a large emphasis placed on publishing in high-impact journals (and often), but isn't the open publishing movement beginning to have an effect, albiet rather small?
Re:What's the point of writing good scientific software?
by nagrom on Sunday February 10, 2013 @06:58AM
(#5196174)
Not that I have seen. In fact, in my experience, even publications are not all that important! In the UK and Germany both it seems to be 30% of what you know, 60% of who you know and 10% luck.
This is fairly standard in the science industry (I use the term deliberately). I get rated (in nuclear and particle physics) on how many papers I've published, what indictions of recognition I get from my peers and at which conferences I've been invited to speak. Short of something like a Millennium Prize or a Nobel (one-in-a-million, and both still very political), there are almost no direct rewards to accuracy or importance.
Academics tend not to be the people with the most understanding or the best direct insight - they're the people with the most friends on committees and who do the most fashionable things (usually badly). And so they appoint new academics who are a little bit worse than them (no point in opening yourself to competition - instead bring in people who are going to be grateful to you!) and the cycle continues.