Grad students are training to become independent researchers. They have the jobs of conducting research (which in most fields is mostly not coding), giving presentations, writing, making figures, reading papers, and taking and teaching classes. Their career and skillset is rarely aligned with long-term maintenance of a software project; usually, they’d be sacrificing their career to build tools for the lab.
I would expect grad students to have very little experience and you could hire people with similar levels of experience (junior engineers) with normal university wages.
Grad students are paid in prestige, research experience, and other forms of career capital, as well as mission, rather than just $s. Even so, arguably many of them are quite underpaid (when many of the EAs I know who have no intrinsic love of the academic life are considering grad school, they think of it as a sacrifice for future impact).
In comparison, software engineers for academia are only paid in $s, plus mission, plus (substantially less) prestige. So paying junior engineers the equivalent to a grad student is quite a raw deal in comparison.
Can’t you just use grad students?
Grad students are training to become independent researchers. They have the jobs of conducting research (which in most fields is mostly not coding), giving presentations, writing, making figures, reading papers, and taking and teaching classes. Their career and skillset is rarely aligned with long-term maintenance of a software project; usually, they’d be sacrificing their career to build tools for the lab.
Many grad students go into the free market later anyway so there should be some that fit.
I would expect grad students to have very little experience and you could hire people with similar levels of experience (junior engineers) with normal university wages.
Grad students are paid in prestige, research experience, and other forms of career capital, as well as mission, rather than just $s. Even so, arguably many of them are quite underpaid (when many of the EAs I know who have no intrinsic love of the academic life are considering grad school, they think of it as a sacrifice for future impact).
In comparison, software engineers for academia are only paid in $s, plus mission, plus (substantially less) prestige. So paying junior engineers the equivalent to a grad student is quite a raw deal in comparison.
Exactly. The incentives are not there to invest in becoming a decent developer.