Having worked as a SWE at both pure academia (as the  engineer implementing for researcher-driven projects at a university) and in a similar position at a bigCO, there is certainly more &quot;software chops&quot; at the latter, but the general sentiment of the research types being far more competent at research than at code is not necessarily unfair.  However, the &quot;developer presence&quot; in these groups is much higher, (and what is expected of even the pure research folks) so it&#x27;s not quite as stark as outside industry.  Still a different world from the pure SWE teams, however.  The intesting thought I&#x27;d add to this is that the problems don&#x27;t always manifest as &quot;bad code&quot;.  Things like measuring tradeoffs and compromises are not always as well thought out in the research teams.  (I&#x27;d mete this statement slightly, to say that researchers have very different mental models for what tradeoffs to make in development from someone with a pure developer background, and this is not always bad, just evident.)