Yes I don't understand the complaints about the salary a software engineer would be paid in academia. A software engineer straight out of undergraduate, typically earns as much (and often more) than a full professor at the university, who is >20 years after their undergraduate. Should they pay the software engineer more than everyone else, even though they don't even work on the core mission (i.e. the science)? What is even more ironic is that this comes from the same crowd who complains about high taxes, well research is primarily paid from tax money (private foundations/donations are a minuscule part of overall research funding), so the money to pay the software engineers would need to come from taxes.
The university doesn't operate in a vacuum, and the rest of the economy doesn't really care about the fairness of internal pay structures at the universities. The engineers aren't telling you it's fair that they get paid more than a professor, they're just relaying the reality of the market, and the university still gets it's labor from the market.
This does play well into my argument that if software salaries in general came down then the rest of the world could utilize software development more broadly across industries, rather than concentrating so much talent into one inflated industry niche (the tech industry is that niche).
> Should they pay the software engineer more than everyone else, even though they don't even work on the core mission (i.e. the science)?
They do not have to pay the software engineer anything if they can find one who is happy with getting nothing.
Salary is always going to be a factor in who they can attract, especially when their competitors can offer much better compensation. If they are satisfied with the software engineers they are currently getting, then they can keep doing what they are doing now.
What the professor gets paid matters very little compared to what the candidate can get at a competitor.
But that's my point, the software developer is not a crucial role in the research process (unlike (most) professors arguably), they are nice to have and definitely helpful, but getting a grant to do research is difficult enough, paying all the funds to a software developer means no research gets done. In other words in most cases a software developer does not add enough value to justify their cost if they get paid like in industry.
I was not complaining about developers being too expensive, I was responding to people who said that they would like to work as a RSE but salaries are too low and explaining why the salaries are so low.
