There actually are some full time developers for scikit-learn - and they are amazingly talented.
There's lots of difficulties in securing that funding though. Getting funding for permanent staff is incredibly tough - usually you have 3 year contracts for 'postdocs' that pay around ~40% of what a similarly skilled software developer could earn. The only stable positions in academia are professorship - and even those are going away in favour of positions where people are expected to pay increasing portions of their salary from their grants.
How can you credibly offer someone 40-50k dollars a year, with no job security, tied to some grants that might or might not be renewed and expect them to turn down offers from companies looking for data scientists?
"How can you credibly offer someone 40-50k dollars a year, with no job security, tied to some grants that might or might not be renewed and expect them to turn down offers from companies looking for data scientists?"
The same way that restaurant owners ask their servers to work for sub-minimum wage and expect them to bring that up to minimum wage via "tips"(Law mandates they bump that up to minimum wage of 7+ if tips don't cover it, but that's separate). Not entirely the same, but it's an alternate form of payment for services rendered. If you ask me, I think it's perfectly reasonable as long as there are no laws meddling and causing an increase of such "odd" remuneration schemes.
I work in academia and I have job security and full benefits. I can't work on projects like this all the time though. I'm responsible for more generalized infrastructure like webservers, but when I have free time I'm welcome to work on stuff like this. I think more academic IT departments should leverage their talent like this.
There's lots of difficulties in securing that funding though. Getting funding for permanent staff is incredibly tough - usually you have 3 year contracts for 'postdocs' that pay around ~40% of what a similarly skilled software developer could earn. The only stable positions in academia are professorship - and even those are going away in favour of positions where people are expected to pay increasing portions of their salary from their grants.
How can you credibly offer someone 40-50k dollars a year, with no job security, tied to some grants that might or might not be renewed and expect them to turn down offers from companies looking for data scientists?