Technical work, including indispensable scientific software development, tends to be considered of low academic value in academia. This is an ingrained attitude. I very recently left after having heard "oh, you're the technical guy" once too often from other academics.

Here's an example. The Globus Online grid ftp service web page intended for users adopts an overtly apologetic tone [1]. Users of this service are promised freedom from "low-value IT considerations and processes"--considerations and processes that the Globus Online team has humbly sought to undertake on their behalf. I have to laugh at the claim that there is "No need to involve your IT admin—all you need is Globus Online." The message is that information technology is of low academic value--unless you happen to have been one of the authors of publications that came out of the Globus Online project. If not, your career is sidelined.

Software development, system administration, network administration and desktop support have become somewhat specialized in the past 30 years, but in the minds of some principal investigators and academic administrators, these very different activities are conflated. An expert in numerical methods, computational fluid dynamics and dynamic downscaling methods for climate assessment models is a seasoned web developer with a portfolio, fluent in jQuery, underscore, backbone, responsive websites with bootstrap, CSS3, HTML5, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, the Google maps API, Cartodb visualizations, as well as an Android developer conversant with the SPen library for the Galaxy Note 10.1. It's as much effort to stay current technically as it is to keep up in the scientific literature.

There are faint signs of improvement. On January 14th, the NSF revised the biosketch format by changing the Publications section to Products [2]. "This change makes clear that products may include, but are not limited to, publications, data sets, software, patents, and copyrights." The previous biosketch format was awkward for software developers, inventors and producers of data sets. 

Recently, a number of prominent computer scientists, and scientific software developers affiliated with the Climate Code Foundation [3], published a Science Code Manifesto [4]. The manifesto includes the recommendation that "software contributions must be included in systems of scientific assessment, credit, and recognition." Software developers in the digital humanities may wish to add their names to the list of signatories.

Whether these developments reflect a broader understanding that software developers ought to enjoy greater recognition and opportunity for advancement in academia that they do currently remains to be seen. Greater career advancement opportunity for software developers, inventors and data set producers working in academia might do something to address the Ph.D. overproduction problem.

But these developments were too little and too late for me. I left.

[1] https://www.globusonline.org/forusers/

[2] http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2013/nsf13004/nsf13004.jsp

[3] http://climatecode.org/

[4] http://sciencecodemanifesto.org

He invented a real (specific) product with prototypes and everything, licensed that product to a real manufacturer who then made it, gained lots of money, and then stiffed him on the payment they promised.

Trolls would have produced no toy at all, for anyone, kept the whole process a secret, and then sued every child who ever flung water at another at a birthday party.

"Its the difference between using a feather and using a chicken." You know it when you see it.

Edit: Just for clarity, its the direction the arrow points. Lonnie Johnson created a product and then went out and sought a company to start producing it. Trolls do it backwards, they go out and find companies that are already producing it and then threaten them with forcing them to stop.