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 "software chops" 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 "developer presence" in these groups is much higher, (and what is expected of even the pure research folks) so it's not quite as stark as outside industry. Still a different world from the pure SWE teams, however. The intesting thought I'd add to this is that the problems don't always manifest as "bad code". Things like measuring tradeoffs and compromises are not always as well thought out in the research teams. (I'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.)