Great case studies! AirBnB and Instagram made smart moves with cross-posting. Why make users choose, when they don’t have to? Even better, they improved the experience of the other platform using their interface (ex. uploading Facebook photos works great, but Instagram adds a lot to the experience). As a bonus, you get free PR on both platforms! Everybody wins with those kinds of growth hacks.
Some things are going to suck in academia, as this guy points out. But, its a necessary step and todays progress is almost always going to be tomorrows shit. So quit bitching.
Biologists are almost never good coders, if they can code at all. But thats not what they do, they signed up for pipettes, not python.
Its the programmers who wrote said shitty code that are to be blamed, but you can't hate under-paid and over-worked phd students who write this code even though it usually has nothing to do with their thesis (the math/algorithm is the main part, the deployable implementation is usually not the most important).
If you want good code and organized/accountable databases, go to industry. Theres nothing new about this transition. The IMPORTANT part, is that industry gives back to academia. So when you get an office with windows and a working coffee machine, remember to help make some phd student's life a little easier by making part of your code open source.