Yeah let me be clear. PhD students
absolutely should get guidance from experienced engineers (so I was a bit over-zealous with "assist" in my parent post). But this should be more like understanding best practices, and they should feel free to ask questions and figure out how to write better code. There are initiatives to do this called Software Carpentry.[0] However, RSEs should not be writing code for students doing PhD level projects in my opinion, for exactly the reasons you mention.
I know some of the big research councils do this in the UK. For example STFC has a program where they'll work with universities and companies to production-ise research code.
> The scientist just wants to focus on their research and once they have a barely working proof of concept, hand it over to the engineer to figure the rest out. The engineer wants a well specified design and prototype that they can lightly refactor to clean up, scale up and turn into a product/tool.
As you say, this is a great idea in principle. In reality I think that it's really difficult to make it work.
[0] https://www.software.ac.uk/programmes-events/carpentries/sof...
I know some of the big research councils do this in the UK. For example STFC has a program where they'll work with universities and companies to production-ise research code.
> The scientist just wants to focus on their research and once they have a barely working proof of concept, hand it over to the engineer to figure the rest out. The engineer wants a well specified design and prototype that they can lightly refactor to clean up, scale up and turn into a product/tool.
As you say, this is a great idea in principle. In reality I think that it's really difficult to make it work.
[0] https://www.software.ac.uk/programmes-events/carpentries/sof...