This makes it sound like if I am a good programmer and I want to help people out (and not get paid market rate, and not get job security), I should find lots of unusually good opportunities within academia. Do you think that’s the case? If so, do you have any suggestions for how to find them? I have zero experience with any university ever.
My guess (from outside the system) is that great opportunities for high impact exist, but the search costs are going to be really high, and academics don’t have a lot of incentive to make the best opportunities legibly better/more prominent than mediocre ones.
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.
This makes it sound like if I am a good programmer and I want to help people out (and not get paid market rate, and not get job security), I should find lots of unusually good opportunities within academia. Do you think that’s the case? If so, do you have any suggestions for how to find them? I have zero experience with any university ever.
My guess (from outside the system) is that great opportunities for high impact exist, but the search costs are going to be really high, and academics don’t have a lot of incentive to make the best opportunities legibly better/more prominent than mediocre ones.
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.