Comment by greydius

I do this kind of work. It's frustrating how awful most of the code is. You'd think people smart enough to pursue stem phds would understand basic programming abstractions, but that is often not the case. Another issue is that researchers don't normally use good software engineering practices. I have yet to be given any code that has even a single unit test. Source control is being used these days, but the repositories are usually unorganized messes with unhelpful commit histories. No one keeps track of system dependencies, and few understand build systems. I can spend a week just trying to get some software to build.

I could keep complaining, but I don't want to give people the impression that I don't like what I do. It beats the hell out of writing CRUD apps.