> I would have thought the scientists among us would approach someone with familiarity with software development expertise.
Is there a pool of skilled software architects willing to provide consultations at well-below market wages? Or a Q&A forum full of people interested in giving this kind of advice? (StackOverflow isn't useful for this; the allowed question scope is too narrow.) I guess one incentive to publish one's code is to get it criticized on places like Hacker News. The best way to get the right answer on the internet is to post the wrong answer, after all.
I'll state the obvious and answer with No. There are not enough skilled software architects to go around and many who consider themselves skilled are not actually producing good code themselves, probably including many confident posters here in this forum.
The idiosyncrasies and tastes of many 'senior' software engineers would likely make the code unreadable and unmaintainable for the average scientist and possibly discourage them from programming altogether.
Software architecture is an unsolved problem as evident in the frequent fundamental discussions about even trivial things, highlighted by a cambrian explosion of frameworks who try to help herding cats, and made obvious in senior programmers struggling to get a handle on moderately complex code.
I propose scientists keep their code base as simple as possible, review the code along with the ideas with their peers, maybe use Jupyter notebooks to show the iterations and keep intermediate steps, and, as others state, show the code as appropriate and try to keep it running. There is no silver bullet and very few programmers could walk into your lab or office and really clean things up the way you'd hope.
I think the suggestion to keep the codebase as simple as possible for scientists applies as well to the software creators.
Life is different when you might have the a relationship with a single code base for 2-5 years, or even more. Complexities will happen on their own, no need to add them in.
> Are the hiring scientists also paid well-below market wages?
Yes. Well, in engineering anyway. That's why most engineers use academia as a stepping stone to something else. Working in science is, I think, sort of like working at a startup that's perpetually short on cash with no possibility of an exit.
Positions requiring a PhD start being listed at 29E (midrange of $55k) or 30E (midrange of $63,800). You could easily get that with a bachelor's degree in engineering 10 years ago. I suspect you will find the "Information Technology" Job Family salaries particularly amusing.
Is there a pool of skilled software architects willing to provide consultations at well-below market wages? Or a Q&A forum full of people interested in giving this kind of advice? (StackOverflow isn't useful for this; the allowed question scope is too narrow.) I guess one incentive to publish one's code is to get it criticized on places like Hacker News. The best way to get the right answer on the internet is to post the wrong answer, after all.