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During my last year of MSc. studies I was part-time employed on the university project. The project was related to my diploma thesis and my task was to create a data-mining software and run experiments using this software.

I've finished the software, run the experiments in it, succesfully graduated and finished the studies. It was a huge success for me and for the university as the diploma thesis was awarded in student's competitions top 10 among 2000 diploma thesis.

Despite this success, the SW I developed is not production-ready, rather just a prototype. For my experiments I considered only happy-case scenarios and if there are some unexpected inputs from the user/from connected systems/uploaded .csv files do not match specification etc., the SW crashes and cannot be used.

My supervisor wants to use the SW usually twice a year. When he runs into some troubles with it, he emails me to deploy fixes so that he can run the experiments. In the first year and a half after I finished the project and the SW, I did it three times. Now he is asking again to debug the problems in the SW and fix them. I do not want to do it, because:

1. I have no time for it because of very time-consuming projects in my current job.


2. I am working in different industry now and during 2 years I forgot many things from the SW development and specific solutions I used.


3. I already lost accesses to production environment at University so I am not able to deploy fixes.


4. I feel stressed out by the requests. As this was prototype I did not set up logging and I usually struggle to find and fix the error cause. I sometimes even cannot reproduce the errors locally and then I really do not know how to fix it.

I wrote these reasons to him, but he insists that I should still help them with it. He offered me they will pay me again some hour rate to support the software, get production accesses again etc. But the money is no matter for me, I just do not want to continue with supporting the tool.

I feel there was some misunderstanding from their side about what are difference between diploma-thesis prototype and production-ready software. We never agreed officially that I would support it, we just once talked about that I would support it "for some time if some problems occurrs" which I believe I did (3 bugfixes/~3MDs of work/ during year and a half after I graduated).

Is there a way how to politely refuse while still keeping good relationship with the supervisor as he is always very nice and polite?

I was thinking to offer him 1-2 days workshop for some of the current university employees where we could go through the code on github and I would officially hand it over to the current employee. But it would not be a solution for him, as there are only 3-5 postgraduate students in their group and they are not programmers, so they cannot take the SW over.

And I feel bad about writing to him: I do not have solution, I do not want to continue with that and I do not care that you cannot use the SW anymore...

I think you are being generous and, given what you say, should be able to step away from the project with a clear conscience.

If he needs the software he should be willing to find a way to pay for support, maybe not you, I think, but some support person.

I would see him if possible or send an email giving much of the information you've given here. The fact that you are doing very different things now and that support is disruptive to your main goals should be definitive.

But I agree that it is good to find a way to keep a good relationship with him if you can also achieve your main goal.

The typical answer over on Workplace.SE would be to say "I'll do it if you pay me X" or "I can only do it if you pay me X". You pick X high enough that you don't think they'll accept (shouldn't be too hard in academia) and high enough that you'd actually be happy to do the work in case they actually do accept it. Unless you actively want to do the work, the amount should at a minimum match what you'd get by spending the same time on your actual job.

It's possible that this will make the professor angry and impair your relationship. However, based on what you write, why do you need to keep him happy? You're in industry now, and what you describe sounds like a very one-sided relationship - you do work, and at best you'd be offered to be paid a small amount. (Or so I assume - academic salaries are typically a bit lower.)

He has had your work for free 3 times already.

If he was serious he would have offered some reward the first time...

Unless you get him to commit to paying upfront, then he won't pay. He should have continued the project with other students since you left but did not, I suggest he won't be able to fund you for your continued work or other students as he cannot get any more funding for that project.

Get out and stay out is my 2 pence worth...