<story><title>A Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors in More Than a Hundred Published Studies</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmjwda/a-code-glitch-may-have-caused-errors-in-more-than-100-published-studies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway57023</author><text>Writing code in research is quite different from writing code in industry. For starters, in research, absolutely no one will read your code. Not your boss, not your peer reviewers, not your colleagues, not your tech-savvy users. No one. They just care about getting the right results and will complain if they don&amp;#x27;t, which &lt;i&gt;most of the time&lt;/i&gt; steers you into producing correct code.&lt;p&gt;Also, most programs usually have a maintainer team that&amp;#x27;s exactly &lt;i&gt;one&lt;/i&gt; (1) person strong, and that person is usually an underpaid grad student or postdoc with a billion other tasks at hand and not much time left for that issue you opened three months ago.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, hey, you never have to fear the dreaded &amp;#x27;code review&amp;#x27;, so it&amp;#x27;s not all bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GordonS</author><text>&amp;gt; Writing code in research is quite different from writing code in industry&lt;p&gt;Hah, not always.&lt;p&gt;A short while back I was tech lead for an AI project, the goal of which was to reduce the weight (and, ergo, cost) of large steel structures.&lt;p&gt;The megacorp consultancy I work for decided to staff this project &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; with AI people, about half of which were fairly fresh graduates. Now, they all had a great grasp of AI, both old-skool (neural networks, genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimisation etc) and more recent innovations. But these were &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; developers.&lt;p&gt;The customer was a Microsoft shop, and mandated that we use C# (which was cool, it&amp;#x27;s my favourite language!), but it was immediately apparent that the &amp;quot;devs&amp;quot; had only basic training in Java. The code was a f&lt;i&gt;cking mess, and we had numerous issues around software engineering concerns such as source control, DevOps and processes - the customer eventually canned the project due to the bugginess of the platform. They really did have some brilliant minds on the project, but those were not the minds of software engineers.&lt;p&gt;On a more recent AI project, unusually I was consulted first on staffing, and I insisted on a mix of AI research types &lt;/i&gt;and* software engineers - unsurprisingly, this project was far more successful.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors in More Than a Hundred Published Studies</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmjwda/a-code-glitch-may-have-caused-errors-in-more-than-100-published-studies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway57023</author><text>Writing code in research is quite different from writing code in industry. For starters, in research, absolutely no one will read your code. Not your boss, not your peer reviewers, not your colleagues, not your tech-savvy users. No one. They just care about getting the right results and will complain if they don&amp;#x27;t, which &lt;i&gt;most of the time&lt;/i&gt; steers you into producing correct code.&lt;p&gt;Also, most programs usually have a maintainer team that&amp;#x27;s exactly &lt;i&gt;one&lt;/i&gt; (1) person strong, and that person is usually an underpaid grad student or postdoc with a billion other tasks at hand and not much time left for that issue you opened three months ago.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, hey, you never have to fear the dreaded &amp;#x27;code review&amp;#x27;, so it&amp;#x27;s not all bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dimtion</author><text>I imagine you said that as tongue in cheek, but good &amp;quot;code reviews&amp;quot; should not be feared. If it is the case it either means that environment you are coding is toxic, or that you have not made clear with your peers that code review is not about judging.&lt;p&gt;Code review should not be about being right or wrong, but as a team to provide the best work possible. People should accept that everybody make mistakes, and the goal of the environment&amp;#x2F;society is to minimize the consequences of those inevitable mistakes, not judge individuals based on arbitrary metrics.</text></comment>