The Human Factor in Software Engineering

Transparency International collects data about the dependencies of German Universities on industry financement: https://www.hochschulwatch.de/

I must say that I am not very worried when software engineering research is financed by companies. In these cases, the university serves as a temporary employment agency. It employs young academic personnel and lends them to enterprises. The financial profit is on both sides. The professor and University can prove that they work on topics which are relevant for practice, and that they can aquire funding. The enterprise gets a highly qualified programmer or consultant at half the prize they might pay for an employee. The doctoral "student" works in practice, instead of becoming an expert in some philosophical topic which will make people laugh when he tries to enter work-life after the doctoral thesis. There are only two disadvantages of these arrangements:

1. Basic research loses its value. As companies do not pay for research like "empirical research on cognitive load during programming" or so (topics which I find thrilling), this topic does not sell well in general. For instance, when one applies for a professorship.
2. The scientific value of a doctoral thesis written in a company might suffer from the need to do practical work like programming a software product. Of course, software engineering scientists at universities also develop software, but they most often support a scientifically developed method or help to evaluate some theory. While software developed by doctoral students at companies rather solve practical problems. Of course, they will use scientific research results, but do they also produce scientific knowledge? Of course, it is possible but maybe not the sponsor's first priority.

The problem of research financed by companies probably is worse in medicine, pharmacy or biology where research projects not only produce new products (which is not bad), but also evaluate their usefulness. If they are biased, the damage is higher. In software engineering research, a biased tool evaluation can not do much harm. But a biased evaluation of pesticides or medicine can be fatal.

Disclaimer: My current research is completely unfinanced and therefore independent of financially motivated influence. :-)