Computer scientists advance in their careers by writing papers, software developers do by writing programs. Some CS grad students and profs are genius programmers, but mostly CS researchers write a program that at best lacks the polish of a real product and at worst almost works.

When I was in physics grad school I had a job writing Java applets for education and did a successful demo of two applications at an CS conference in Syracuse and was congratulated for by bravery. I was not so brave, I expected these programs to work every time for people who came to our web site. (Geoff Fox, organizer of the conference, did an unsuccessful demo where two Eastern European twins tried to make an SGI supercomputer show some graphics and said “never buy a gigabyte of cheap RAM!”)

> Computer scientists advance in their careers by writing papers, software developers do by writing programs.

Rather: Computer scientists advance in their careers by writing papers, software developers do advance in their careers by becoming managers.

:-(