It's called an internship (for graduate students), but you're right that it should go the other way too but you'd run into a lot of money, IP, and institutional politics issues. Occasionally there are older industry people who work as staff scientists who get paid little and support the research effort in some capacity, usually IT. The biggest reasons why it doesn't happen as often are because in many cases, people who become professors have never done anything in industry, don't care unless funding is part of the conversation, or aren't motivated to have artifacts be reproducible. Their research group is a fiefdom over which they wield control, so unless they want to start a company on the side, they don't care about your programming skills and they don't like to give up any control.