[HN Gopher] Science needs more research software engineers
___________________________________________________________________
Science needs more research software engineers
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 489 points
Date : 2022-06-01 02:28 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| euroderf wrote:
| Having a Ph.D sounds like an ANTI-qualification for this kind of
| position. A PhD would be a diversion from the kind of practical
| experience that would make a software developer with a sci/tech
| background & scientific interests useful in an environment full
| of smart people who possibly can't code worth a damn.
|
| More important than having one's own PhD laser-focus would be an
| ability to communicate with a variety of people doing their own
| research, and understand their domains just well enough to
| write/fix/improve their damn software and maybe even publish it
| (semi-productised) as open source too.
|
| A couple of application languages, some shell skills, maybe some
| data wrangling, and some software development common sense borne
| of experience.
| epse wrote:
| Possibly, but at least some experience in academia is terribly
| helpful, speaking from experience. There's a lot of
| particuliarities in funding, organisation, terminology, special
| stacks, ... You can certainly learn them "on the job", but if
| you already know them, even better
| ehnto wrote:
| I found this to be true. I was totally blow away by just how
| different of a world academia was, and how differently it
| operated. Software as a cost centre was a very unique
| experience on it's own, and software practices melded with
| institutional processes was genuinely shocking to me. Being
| able to take that stuff on the chin and still want to work
| there is probably not something you'll get from people who've
| been enjoying a cruisey experience in industry.
| euroderf wrote:
| Just wondering then, how much of that kind of knowledge is
| portable among academic research environments, and how much
| is peculiar to every individual environment ? Is there
| something that is dying to be written up for people entering
| the field ?
| aragilar wrote:
| Different aspects will be differently portable (e.g.
| funding will region specific, modulo field specific
| schemes).
|
| Having a PhD (in a relevant field) gives you domain
| knowledge as well as knowing where the pitfalls are, and a
| PhD in general will mean you're at least familiar with what
| questions to ask/who to ask those questions.
| tgbugs wrote:
| For this to work academic science would have to start paying
| significantly more, which many labs simply cannot do, and other
| labs will refuse to do.
|
| My PI flat out said when we were trying to hire a python
| developer that they simply could not be paid 2x more than anyone
| else because it would cause major issues with team cohesion. 2x
| is the bare minimum to even get close to market rate for a full
| time developer who won't dance out the door a year later.
|
| By this logic either everyone in science needs to get a massive
| raise (stop to the PhD slave labor?), or rse's really have to
| justify their salary, and when everyone else works 60-80 hours a
| week for half the pay and is also defacto on call, that
| justification looks like zero work life balance.
|
| Talk to a funder near you, let them know that congress needs to
| provide more money for basic research. Be sure to sell it as
| training future employees for big tech too since they will all
| eventually leave after you finish teaching them.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| _let them know that congress needs to provide more money for
| basic research_
|
| That won't work. Academia isn't under-funded, especially not in
| the USA. The NSF budget last year was $7.7 billion so money is
| there.
|
| The reason salaries are so low is because academia will
| generally choose to expand the empire by creating new projects
| and hiring more postdocs over raising salaries of their
| existing team. And they can, because lots of people have stars
| in their eyes about science. They see it as more virtuous than
| mere product building and are willing to put up with a lot for
| the associated prestige. Also they may have picked their
| vocation early on in life when their understandings of real
| market rates was poor, then get stuck in it.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Yes I don't understand the complaints about the salary a
| software engineer would be paid in academia. A software
| engineer straight out of undergraduate, typically earns as much
| (and often more) than a full professor at the university, who
| is >20 years after their undergraduate. Should they pay the
| software engineer more than everyone else, even though they
| don't even work on the core mission (i.e. the science)? What is
| even more ironic is that this comes from the same crowd who
| complains about high taxes, well research is primarily paid
| from tax money (private foundations/donations are a minuscule
| part of overall research funding), so the money to pay the
| software engineers would need to come from taxes.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > Should they pay the software engineer more than everyone
| else, even though they don't even work on the core mission
| (i.e. the science)?
|
| They do not have to pay the software engineer anything if
| they can find one who is happy with getting nothing.
|
| Salary is always going to be a factor in who they can
| attract, especially when their competitors can offer much
| better compensation. If they are satisfied with the software
| engineers they are currently getting, then they can keep
| doing what they are doing now.
|
| What the professor gets paid matters very little compared to
| what the candidate can get at a competitor.
| cycomanic wrote:
| But that's my point, the software developer is not a
| crucial role in the research process (unlike (most)
| professors arguably), they are nice to have and definitely
| helpful, but getting a grant to do research is difficult
| enough, paying all the funds to a software developer means
| no research gets done. In other words in most cases a
| software developer does not add enough value to justify
| their cost if they get paid like in industry.
|
| I was not complaining about developers being too expensive,
| I was responding to people who said that they would like to
| work as a RSE but salaries are too low and explaining why
| the salaries are so low.
| ehnto wrote:
| The university doesn't operate in a vacuum, and the rest of
| the economy doesn't really care about the fairness of
| internal pay structures at the universities. The engineers
| aren't telling you it's fair that they get paid more than a
| professor, they're just relaying the reality of the market,
| and the university still gets it's labor from the market.
|
| This does play well into my argument that if software
| salaries in general came down then the rest of the world
| could utilize software development more broadly across
| industries, rather than concentrating so much talent into one
| inflated industry niche (the tech industry is that niche).
| signaru wrote:
| Research software engineers need to be more recognized.
|
| In my workplace, I am the rare one who can code C++ to work with
| drivers for real time stuff and develop C# GUIs for convenience
| and automation. Everyone else is happy with Python or Matlab
| scripts that are only usable to one person and always need to be
| edited even for the simplest parameter changes. I would do
| analysis stuff in real time in a camera feed and adjust the
| experiment in real time, while others could only analyze an image
| after being saved. The difference in productivity is literally a
| hundred times. In most cases the job would have been impossible
| otherwise or at least painfully inefficient.
|
| Unfortunately, research leaders cannot tell the difference (or
| pretend to), and just label everyone the same. They are not
| software engineers themselves, and are probably even insecure. I
| feel my opportunities and potential are not being recognized
| either. I also feel that they don't respect that software
| development needs more time as they will just dump as much tasks
| to me as the other non-software engineers.
|
| I have to eventually leave such groups as I don't see their
| willingness to step up in their coding skills despite being
| heavily reliant on my output. Draconian intellectual ownership
| rules don't help either.
| pojzon wrote:
| In the world of ever increasing cost of living, sane ppl will
| always take best compensation offers.
|
| Everyone has the same thinking that we will be here 40-70years
| and our finite time is worth more and more.
|
| Im sorry for the ppl tho dont have options to do better for w/e
| reasons.
| harimau777 wrote:
| When the research wins a Nobel prize is the Software Engineer one
| of the winners or just the scientists in charge? My understanding
| is that it's the scientists.
|
| If Science wants more research software engineers then they
| should start treating them like peers rather than hired help.
| analog31 wrote:
| I'm a R&D scientist, working in industry. My work site has a full
| blown software department. Yet I do all of my own coding. Pay and
| status are not issues -- if I had a programmer working for me,
| they'd get paid according to industry standards.
|
| Some other issues include:
|
| 1. Knowing that software development can be a black hole. Nearly
| half a century after _The Mythical Man Month_ , management of
| software projects remains an unsolved problem. And we're not
| gifted managers to begin with. When I do it myself, if nothing
| else, I have a pretty good sense of when it will be done.
|
| 2. What to do if there's not enough programming work for a full
| time programmer, and that person doesn't want to work on other
| things.
|
| 3. It seems like programmers with domain skills related to R&D,
| such as math, are in particular demand.
|
| 4. It takes a certain temperament to hang in an R&D setting. A
| lot of engineers just hate it: The rapidly shifting requirements,
| and the knowledge that something they make will only be used
| once, or even wrecked.
|
| The dirty secret is that the same programming work that's a step
| down for a commercial developer, might be a step up for a grad
| student or researcher who wants to learn a marketable skill.
| Also, a multi-disciplinary team, including people who can program
| as needed but also do other things, can be quite agile.
|
| My team has a software engineer, but he doesn't do very much
| coding for us. He has actual R&D projects of his own. Yet he can
| help us at a higher level, for instance giving guidance on how we
| can write better code, and make better use of tools. This brings
| us a lot of benefit without wasting his brain cells on mundane
| coding tasks.
| milliams wrote:
| I'm an RSE and the president of the Society of Research Software
| Engineering (https://society-rse.org), a small grass-roots
| registered charity in the UK that acts as a home for RSEs in the
| UK and internationally. We came about from the organisers of the
| RSE conference (https://rsecon2022.society-rse.org) and from the
| early pioneers in the naming and recognition of RSEs.
|
| The other comments in this thread indeed point out the issue of
| poor salary compared with industry, this is a problem that I feel
| will persist. Historically, the benefit of working at a
| University over a company has been greater freedom, better
| benefits and (at least for me) the knowledge that you;re working
| for the public benefit. Unfortunately, the benefits are being
| reduced as time goes on as Universities are under greater
| financial stress.
|
| My role as an RSE at the University of Bristol has been in a
| primarily teaching position for the last few years, where I have
| been training PhD students, postdocs and research staff (all the
| way up to and including professors) in both the basics of
| programming but also testing, version control, profiling etc. My
| role is funded indirectly by the government as it is recognised
| by the funding agencies that RSE skills are essential for modern
| research and they are putting their money where their mouth is by
| funding more software projects, fellowships and training
| programmes in this area.
|
| If you think that you'd like to know more about getting involved
| as an as RSE, or if you work as one an would like to meet like-
| minded people then you can join as a member of the Society, join
| our Slack channel or our mailing list (https://society-
| rse.org/join-us/) or find out how you can get involved
| (https://society-rse.org/community/get-involved/).
| antipaul wrote:
| "I want to see RSEs as equals in the academic environment"
|
| Not just in academia, but also in biotech/pharma, where MDs or
| MBAs are too often the top dog.
|
| This largely explains why Pharma and healthcare is so behind when
| it comes to tech
|
| (Exceptions are the new, small biotechs. But the larger ones are
| more like dinosaurs)
| dmead wrote:
| Research software engineer here.
|
| This is probably not going to happen unless my employer decides
| to pay something competitive with industry. I'm here because I
| want to be. There is an opportunity cost here and not many people
| are willing to pay it.
| iosystem wrote:
| As someone that works as one. I would recommend NOT being a
| research software engineer if you value your health and haven't
| obtained financial freedom. Cost of living is always increasing
| and the lower pay isn't worth it. The work is more stressful as
| well because proper software development isn't respected.
| Previously worked at FANG.
| waynecochran wrote:
| I think it is funny that Perl saved the human genome project (htt
| ps://bioperl.org/articles/How_Perl_saved_human_genome.htm...). I
| wrote some Perl for a science grad student and it got me
| published in Genome Research: Matthew J.
| Lambert, Wayne O. Cochran. Kyle G. Olsen, Cynthia D. Cooper,
| Evidence for widespread subfunctionalization of splice forms in
| vertebrate genomes, {\em Genome Research.} 2015 May;
| 25(5): 624D632.
| xroja wrote:
| I've worked at a top research university for the past 15 years as
| a research software engineer. Many of these comments have some
| truth but a lot are definitely not universally true.
|
| Poor compensation: Yup, I'll cop to that. I could be making way
| more in "industry" but I make enough to live and I don't build
| ad-ware and do take pride in my work.
|
| Being a PhD but little respect: I actually have the opposite
| experience. I'm not a PhD, I don't even have a Masters. But I can
| write decent software and I get respect and recognition from my
| PIs and other top-tier faculty that we've collaborated with. I
| feel like I've gotten just as much respect with my humble BS in
| Comp Sci from a state school than if I got a MS/PhD.
|
| Micromanagement: I have the total opposite experience. I've
| worked with the same group for a long time, maybe that changes
| things. We apply for and receive grants to work on projects. We
| make high-level assertions for what we will do during the course
| of the grant and our PI gives us lots of lee-way to meet the
| goals of the grant in whatever technical way gets results, is
| FAIR, and open. Granted, I may have just lucked out here.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I also had a good experience as a research software engineer.
| Tons of autonomy and fun work. Reasonable expectations and no
| overwork. But it was barely a job, I got paid like a tenth of
| what I make in industry. Once I saw the kinds of offers friends
| were getting, I was out.
|
| (My research institute didn't have a concept of "research
| software engineer" so I was paid as a generic research
| assistant.)
| pugworthy wrote:
| I no longer do so, but I was also an RSE (Senior Faculty
| Research Assistant) for 13 years with a large university, and
| loved it. Pay was not great great, but just fine all things
| considered. I respected the PIs I worked for and they respected
| me. I was constantly learning new, interesting scientific
| things as I'd work with new and evolving projects. I even got
| my name on papers even though I didn't even know I could be a
| co-author.
| prpl wrote:
| I kind of alluded to this, but my experience was slightly
| similar.
|
| B.S. in Physics (w/ years of significant undergrad research),
| but worked with PhDs+ in national lab scenario. At some point
| everybody assumes you have an PhD.
|
| Little to no micromanagement. It was more professional
| scenario.
|
| IMO an RSE at a mid-ranked state school hired by a PI and
| embedded into a research group, compared to an RSE at a top-
| tier research University - at a lab or institute that employs
| many engineers, they will have vastly different experiences and
| probably pay as well. There's exceptions to the rule, but this
| is generally my experience.
|
| There's a good chunk of both jobs, but I would not work the
| former.
| coffee2022 wrote:
| Lets be honest. Searching for https://hn.algolia.com/?q=burnout
| in hn shows so many people suffering from burnouts working in
| industry.
|
| My SO is a research software engineer.
|
| 1. As you say, she doesn't build ad-ware and do take pride...
| 2. relaxed and convenient job timings 3. In EU - close to 31
| days paid + usually Professors are very generous about going
| home early etc... 4. Pension, unions, unlimited contracts 5. No
| one gives a shit when github/gitlab/heroku loses credentials on
| a Easter weekend. (We were in roadtrip) - chill life.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Obviously "research" and "industry" are not monolithic
| entities. It's possible to have a relaxing and fulfilling and
| balanced work environment in industry too.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I was also very surprised by the micromanagement comments. I
| have seen much more the opposite end of things (in particular
| with PhD students), which is not enough management guidance. I
| know that none of the academics I know would have time (and
| interest) to micromanage their PhD students, let alone a
| software engineer working on some software for the group.
| breck wrote:
| I also did a couple years at a university as a research
| software engineer and my experience matches yours.
| powerslacker wrote:
| If you need them then pay them.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Pay them and treat them well and with respect. Money can only
| hold someone for so long if they're treated poorly and like an
| inferior.
| bmitc wrote:
| I don't think scientists want research software engineers. PIs
| typically like to assume any and every role on a project,
| including software design. They don't like handing things off and
| letting people build modern, best practices software. You start
| talking about source code control, package managers, a language
| used in industry that they've never even heard of and don't care
| enough to learn about, etc., and you just get asked "why can't
| you just write it in Python or C because those are the only two
| things I'm remotely familiar with and zip it up and put it on a
| USB drive?". Heaven forbid you actually want to do something
| novel, no matter how enabling it could be. I have been
| continually inspired by Bret Victor's _Seeing Spaces_ talk and
| have always wanted to build such a system described for a lab,
| but unfortunately, it was really hard to get anyone interested
| much less excited by such an idea. Scientists are far more
| institutionalized, conservative, and myopic than they admit.
| Physicists don 't even use the proper word for code. They call it
| "codes". (I've seen in first-hand, in research papers, and in
| published books. It's endemic.)
|
| I've literally sat in meetings trying to get access to scientific
| projects I'm interested in and applied for jobs even at the
| university I already worked at in similar capacities, and yet,
| it's filled with PIs just wanting grunt labor (i.e., what they're
| used to from graduate students) to build things that they
| understand or you absolutely never hear back or the pay is a
| third of what you already make. And then there's pockets of
| software people in this niche world that only want to do things
| their way, because that's all they've ever done, and they can
| really be quite obstinate. They're like this massive pillar you
| must somehow work around.
|
| I really, really, _really_ like writing software in scientific
| contexts, but it 's such a quagmire. I'd like to return to that
| world some day with the lessons I've learned outside of it.
| Software in support of an interesting domain or context is just
| really fun. I've also tried getting a job at an architecture firm
| that had some very neat ideas for building out a tool, but the
| response was basically the same as described above.
| jll29 wrote:
| PI here (Research Professor of AI, former industry R&D
| director, so I have seen both sides). The money will never be
| the same in academia, and rewards are outside of the control of
| the PI in most cases (e.g. in Germany, it's a government-level
| decision and everyone is paid the same), so there are two
| options: work with average people or find smart & idealistic
| ones. So...
|
| ...please excuse this shameless plug: I'm interested in people
| who would like to work with me to build research software (both
| on-premise and AWS cloud) using best practices, in particular
| using Rust. If you are interesteed in machine learning, natural
| language processing and information retrieval and would like to
| work with me as a research software engineer, please do get in
| touch (leidner at acm dot org). Our new 2 TB RAM dev research
| group server running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is waiting for you
| (CPU/GPU cluster ressources also available) to set up (a VM
| for) your CI infrastructure. Your software will be used to push
| forward the frontier of research in machine learning and its
| applications to language (summarization, question answering)
| and information retrieval (vertical search engines, learning to
| rank, unsupervised topic modeling).
|
| Edit: academia can be poorly funded and bureaucratic. The
| former can be fixed by grant applications, the latter must be
| tolerated until politicians/activists fix it.
| inciampati wrote:
| The fact that you included a job posting in your comment
| might be the best evidence in this thread that it's hard to
| hire RSEs. Good luck of course :)
| [deleted]
| mikebenfield wrote:
| > They call it "codes"
|
| This is not really the core issue here, but yes, I've
| encountered this many times, and I have to admit that in some
| professional contexts I use "codes" as a shibboleth to identify
| people who aren't really in touch with the software engineering
| world.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I wonder if this used to be the more common term, and at some
| point we switched to "code". Physicists were among the first
| serious computer users, but their software culture may have
| bifurcated from ours at some point.
| dguest wrote:
| I always assumed it came from big international physics
| experiments where English is most people's second language.
| People who learn to program in an expat community are going
| to pick up some jargon that will sound weird to native
| English speakers in California.
| sseagull wrote:
| > They call it "codes"
|
| They/We have probably been calling it that since before you
| were alive. I wouldn't be surprised if it comes from the 60s or
| 70s.
|
| Every group of people has their own terminology for stuff.
| There is no right or wrong.
| bmitc wrote:
| I have never heard or read anyone, beside physicists, say
| codes for software code. It doesn't even make sense. Where
| have you seen that used?
| rsfern wrote:
| It's used fairly often in the US national lab community
| (Not just among physicists).
|
| I think the point is that the physicists were among the
| very early adopters of computing systems. I'm not sure
| about the history of the term "code" used this way, but it
| might literally predate compiled software since Ulam and
| von Neumann invented the Monte Carlo method in 1948 during
| the Manhattan Project.
|
| Personally I think it just sounds outdated now, but it's
| pretty common to hear people call their software "a
| hydrodynamics code" or "a molecular dynamics code"
| sseagull wrote:
| Now I do wonder about the history of the term.
|
| The tendency is to call computational science software
| "codes", but I've never heard a scientist call, ie a web
| browser, a code.
|
| There's a different connotation. Like how theres a
| different connotation between a program, an application,
| and and app. The are largely synonymous, but have
| slightly different uses.
| inejge wrote:
| _I have never heard or read anyone, beside physicists, say
| codes for software code. It doesn 't even make sense._
|
| Why not? "A code" is a software package which solves some
| kind of problem computationally. Plural, codes. I'm sure
| it's been in use almost as long as the programmable
| computers. Here's[1] a link to an article from 1968 which
| uses the term in the singular ("The MENE Neutron Transport
| Code".)
|
| [1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/4819611-mene-neutron-
| transport-c...
| bmitc wrote:
| There are plenty of words in English that have the same
| singular and plural form.
| auxym wrote:
| It's pretty widely used in "traditional" engineering, at
| least in mechanical/civil/nuclear/aerospace. My impression
| is that it's probably a holdover from the good old days
| FORTRAN-IV.
|
| See for example Code_Aster (as in, "a code"), which is one
| of the largest projects for open source FEA (and it mostly
| rooted in academia).
| rfrey wrote:
| All mechanical engineers. All of them. Even that guy, who
| corrects himself when you're in the room - as soon as
| you're gone, they're back to the codes.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| I've seen it a lot outside of physics.
|
| Obviously, what word they use for it is arbitrary but it's
| indicative of an actual problem - they're all totally cut
| off from the software engineering / CS community. Lots of
| them think programming is like learning to juggle or ride a
| bike or something, a skill that anyone just learns and then
| they're done. Then, obviously, they make major mistakes
| that invalidate their conclusions and _nobody_ notices or
| cares because it 's all student code, all the time.
| kergonath wrote:
| Yeah. Considering how much time we spend developing and using
| the damn things, we'll call them the way we like, thank you
| very much. We don't really need condescending software types
| to just come and explain to us how we're saying it wrong.
| That is particularly rich, considering the tendency of CS
| people to cargo cult and borrow physical terms without
| understanding them.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Yes, please stop naming your software projects after
| elementary particles :).
| [deleted]
| pyb wrote:
| Always annoying to hear machine learning people speak of
| "tensors"...
| cozzyd wrote:
| I'm still waiting for std::pseudovector<T>
| cycomanic wrote:
| You seem to attribute certainl motivations to the PIs based on
| some misconceptions of the incentives and constrains for doing
| research. It is true that scientific software engineering is
| undervalued and this is one of the many issues in modern
| science. However attributing this to PIs wanting to do
| everything themselves is completely off the mark. One of the
| biggest issues in science today is that PIs can't do anything
| themselves, they, after having been trained as scientist for
| years, become glorified managers and administrators.
|
| The reason why they can't and don't want to hire software
| engineers to build well designed software is because they don't
| have any money for it and it is very mismatched with their
| incentives. If a PI gets a grant for a project, they typically
| get a constrained budget to achieve the scientific goals of the
| project. There is usually no money (and it would not be
| approved) to engineer well designed software, because that
| doesn't produce scientific outcomes.
|
| Now in the situations when there is budget for this, which are
| the super large institutional research initiatives, like e.g.
| CERN, they build incredibly well designed software. The SKA for
| example will have the largest storage cloud in the world.
|
| If one wants better designed scientific software one needs to
| seriously overhaul the scientific funding process and quite
| significantly increase funding.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| I recently quit a job as a software engineer on a research
| project for all the reasons mentioned. They want grunts who
| don't care about project management or good engineering
| practices and they will belittle you as not worth the money
| even when you took a (theoretical, as I am overemployed)
| massive paycut to go and work for them. I made 1/3 there
| compared to the jobs I am interviewing for to replace it.
|
| These people desperately need software help and have worthwhile
| projects that need software help. They also need to learn to
| collaborate over just parsing out obscure goals and being upset
| when what they get matches their three sentence email and not
| their vision in their head.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Are you saying that you hold multiple full-time jobs?
| bmitc wrote:
| Yea, it's frustrating because there are indeed some super
| cool projects just waiting to have interesting software
| written for them, _especially_ in the more hardware /physical
| oriented R&D areas. There are _some_ areas that take software
| seriously, but in general, I have found it really difficult
| to get scientists and research engineers excited about
| anything that they don 't know about. I don't think its
| malice. I think its part of their education and
| institutionalization couple a little with arrogance and
| somewhat blind view towards areas outside their expertise. I
| have given presentations before, and I usually only got
| interesting feedback from non-PI level workers. I always
| tried to paint a picture that we were doing state of the art
| technology development, so why shouldn't state of the art
| software be developed to support that?
| cycomanic wrote:
| It's very interesting that you say you find it difficult to
| get scientists excited about anything, because I am told
| pretty much the opposite. To give you the perspective, I'm
| a scientist and my partner is a GP. I obviously have many
| friends who also work in science and one thing that my
| partner noticed quite early after we met is that the
| scientist friends (and myself) would ask a lot of questions
| when she was talking about her work, and really tried to
| understand reasons, mechanisms etc.. She noted that this
| was very different to almost everyone else.
|
| I can definitely tell you that if I talk about my work non-
| scientists become quickly uninterested.
| bmitc wrote:
| In my experience, scientists do not like anything that
| they perceive as "soft". I like to say that the hard
| sciences are actually the easy ones and the soft sciences
| are actually the hard ones. (As it turns out, Herbert
| Simon also said this.) The point is that when you discuss
| things like design, complexity, architecture, systems
| thinking, etc., I've found that this does not stick, so
| to speak. Scientists do not see beauty in form equaling
| function. In my experience, scientists like learning
| about things they consider science-y enough for their
| tastes.
|
| This is all painting with broad strokes, but in my
| experience, the most interesting intellectual
| conversations I've had have been with people with the
| least amount of degrees. I always feel when I talk to
| someone with a Ph.D., they're afraid to let it be known
| someone might know more than them and if that happens,
| then it's suddenly something that's not important.
|
| The book _Disciplined Minds_ gets at this some. It 's
| part institutionalization and other things. My gut
| feeling is that it's exacerbated by publish or perish
| culture and the push to always be right. So people that
| are brought up through that are intellectually risk
| averse.
| cozzyd wrote:
| On the flip side of that, many experiments run for decades
| or longer, and "state of the art" software is often a poor
| impedance match for that.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| State of the art doesn't necessarily mean React. Just
| something with unit tests and more than one giant 5000
| line file.
|
| If the requirement is that it lasts 30 years, you can
| choose more timeless languages like C, over say Rust.
| cozzyd wrote:
| I guess a better word for that might be "not terrible"
| :).
|
| And yes, way too much research code reads like somebody's
| first coding project.
| bmitc wrote:
| I'm not convinced of that. Because what I've seen
| (several times) on a somewhat small scale perhaps, is
| someone's code, sometimes written decades ago, never
| maintained upgraded or properly developed used for years
| on a system and eventually it gives out, forcing
| basically a rewrite. And state of the art can mean
| different things for differently scaled projects.
| cycomanic wrote:
| You have too look at the big picture though. How much
| time would have been needed to train the PhD student
| (might have been even the PI) to write more maintainable
| code 10 years ago, and maintain that code to "best
| practices" over the time, compared to write that it works
| once and need to rewrite once after 10 years?
|
| Moreover, people tend to forget that scientific software
| evolves much more slowly than commercial software and the
| number of people who work on this are much fewer, so why
| always adopt the newest method, if the code is still
| working. Show me commercial projects that have had the
| stability of something like LAPACK or BLAS, those
| essentially had a stable API for > 50 years now, with
| very few bugs.
| bmitc wrote:
| It's okay for things to start off rough, especially
| depending on the context. But there's often not much
| excuse for things to be taken seriously and evolved.
|
| But to be honest, I've seen this in industry as well from
| software developers. So maybe it's just a law of software
| development that's amplified in scientific software.
| cozzyd wrote:
| I've certainly had to resurrect research code written 10+
| years before I got to it. It's usually not too hard as
| long as it's in C/C++/Fortran and doesn't have too many
| dependencies. Something like Matlab, on the other hand,
| is often a nightmare...
| l0b0 wrote:
| I'd encourage you to have a look at a well-known European
| physics research laboratory's (rhymes with Bern) library and
| engineering departments ( _not_ IT, unless they 've started
| using version control and tests since I worked there). The
| salary is not as bad as academia, and there's plenty of
| interesting stuff going on. Most of it is accessible to anyone
| interested in a way I've not seen outside of academia.
| bmitc wrote:
| Certainly cool stuff but out of the question due to location.
| I've worked for or met with people from similar size (at
| least in ambition) projects. It's a tough world to break into
| and especially difficult to bring a different outlook to.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| Have you considered US's national labs if you are in the
| US?
| myst1 wrote:
| Hard to get into, have to move to one of five places,
| usually requires security clearances (huge ordeal),
| extremely clean lifestyle, if your PI is evil expect zero
| protection, post doc can be considered entry level
| qualifications, can be asked to work 7 days a week.
| Ultimately, usually still pays less than entry level
| software positions offering full time remote work...
| l0b0 wrote:
| I can understand not wanting to move very far, but the
| location is in many ways great: French alps within driving
| distance, Jura within walking distance, the lake, old
| architecture, lots of fields and forests. World-leading
| public transport. Geneva itself isn't very exciting, to be
| fair, but you're in the heart of Europe with easy access to
| all the rest.
|
| As for "breaking in," I dunno. The hiring process seems
| very fair and international (very few locals work there in
| a technical capacity AFAICT), and there are plenty of
| people with flexible ideas. Not everyone, for sure, but
| then there are so many different groups there you couldn't
| possibly blanket everyone with that statement.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I think you accidentally revealed the problem when you said
| "best practices", because asserting such introduces a presumed
| total order on expertise, and that introduces conflict. thus
| ends the discussion between a PI and someone telling them they
| know better?
| bmitc wrote:
| It's pretty easy for me to acquiesce all design decisions to
| their expertise and/or role in addition to being excited by
| what they do. I'd just like that to be reciprocated.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| See this infamous discussion:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/6l2esd/d_w...
|
| Tldr: They view software as just a tool and don't see how
| they'll benefit from following best practices.
| saghm wrote:
| Oh wow, looking at that Python code they linked to brings
| back memories of my ML course in college. We had skeleton
| code given to us to fill in for the assignments, and often
| times it took longer for me to understand what the code they
| gave was even doing so I'd know what to fill in than it took
| me to actually write the code. Occasionally there would be
| random semicolons at the end of the lines, but the author
| seemed to understand that wasn't necessary in Python since
| they weren't on most lines, so I guess they were just
| careless. They also used a very amusing "OO" pattern where
| they would pass in every input needed to the constructor of
| objects, then have one method pass all of those instance
| variables directly into other methods which ignored the fact
| that they had a `self` parameter and just used the copies of
| the instance variables (with the same names) passed in as
| parameters. The biggest confusion I ever had was in one
| method where they used the typical `n, d = matrix.dimensions`
| (I can't remember the exact incantation, but it was used in
| all the code to store the dimensions in `n` and `d`,
| immediately followed by `d = d + 1`, which I took to assume
| that the leftmost column of the matrix was just filled with
| 1s and wasn't needed (which happened in some of the
| algorithms), but then down in the implementation of the
| algorithm, the only time `d` was used was as `d - 1`. Because
| I had mentally skipped over the boilerplate at the top of the
| function, I spent a decent amount of time trying to figure
| out why they had subtracted 1 from d until I finally saw the
| increment above. To this day, I still struggle to decide if
| the author legitimately did not notice this and just used `d
| - 1` to try to fix a problem that they didn't know the source
| of, or if they knew and thought that it was a reasonable way
| to implement things, and I'm also still conflicted about
| which would be worse.
| wombatpm wrote:
| You can write FORTRAN code in many languages
| hoseja wrote:
| Good craftsmen care for their "just tools", this is
| delinquency.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I had the title "Research Software Engineer" well over 10 years
| ago, and worked as a research software engineer in another role
| prior to that with a random title.
|
| Contrary to many of the posts I see here, it was a great job,
| except for the below-market pay. I felt like I was contributing
| to something valuable. It beat working on yet another boring
| commerce website. I had interesting coworkers and worked with
| interesting technology.
|
| I didn't experience any of the politics around academia. I felt
| respected by everyone. I don't have a PhD. I don't even have an
| undergrad degree. I dropped out of highschool, got a GED, and did
| a couple years of undergrad, got hired by the university, and
| never finished. No one ever treated me like I was second-class.
|
| The only reason I'm not still working as a RSE is because I took
| a 50% pay cut when I took the job and was lured away by money
| later.
|
| I wonder how many of the negative commenters here have any actual
| experience as or with RSEs.
| denkmoon wrote:
| I was a "research software engineer" for a major research
| organisation in Australia. There just weren't the resources to
| achieve what was desired. It would have taken me at least 24
| months to modify the existing ecological modelling framework to
| work in the way they were asking for, they wanted it done
| yesterday, and there was no money to bring on another engineer to
| spread the load.
|
| Instead I got given an intern from the internship program. While
| I tried my best to give them a good experience, let's just say
| that wasn't the boon to productivity my manager thought it was
| going to be.
|
| To make matters worse, one of the researchers in the PhD program
| had been told these changes would be ready shortly before I even
| started, and the PhD candidate had made a series of choices about
| their studies relying on those changes being available. Felt bad
| to have to break the bad news to him after the lab manager had
| been blowing smoke up his ass for so long.
| grillorafael wrote:
| I would happily stop everything that I'm doing to become an RSE
| if it paid well enough. I really like the field and what it is
| but if it doesn't pay the bill then it doesn't pay the bill.
| seydor wrote:
| Most academic code is crap so there is that. the coworkers will
| be very bad programmers, difficult to advance (you should always
| work with people better than you). Computational papers are not
| often appreciated. Too much talk and too many pivots , too little
| code, at least too little pleasant code-writing. Unless you have
| a lot of ego, you will be ignored.
|
| I am sure a lot of academic code would be written by the open
| source community, but alas , researchers are very stingy giving
| out their data
| brnt wrote:
| I work in an academic research software development team. We
| develop software that helps researchers execute neuroscientific
| models on HPC. Funding is our biggest headache. Currently we're
| funded through a (very) large EU grant, which gave our project a
| runway, but we find that nobody in general is funding such
| supportive (but essential) projects. Research funding is tied to
| scientific outputs (i.e. papers), and not anything else. We're
| trying to get some researchers interested in getting funding
| together, but it's not going very well, and we don't expect to be
| able to keep our current strength.
|
| If anyone has ideas, I'm all ears!
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Software engineer looks at some scientists' code and speeds it up
| 14000X:
|
| http://james.hiebert.name/blog/work/2015/09/14/CS-FTW.html
| gsliepen wrote:
| I was a research engineer for ~10 years, and my experience was
| that my immediate colleagues were very appreciative of the work I
| was doing, but that the university bureaucracy system is not. In
| the beginning it is a very decent position (compared to a PhD);
| less load and better pay, and lots of autonomy. However, it is a
| dead end for your career, there is no promotion path. I liked
| working as a RSE a lot, but indeed moving to the industry will
| give you a huge salary rise and a career path.
| georgia_peach wrote:
| Like looks after like. No matter how good you are, how much value
| you bring, if you don't fall under the employer's NAICS code,
| expect the waterboy treatment.
| ethanwillis wrote:
| Well, then science needs to do more to create an environment
| where software engineers would _want_ to be an RSE.
|
| From my experience "science" does not appreciate RSEs, the
| compensation is bad, the freedom is bad, and you get all of the
| big company bureaucracy from the University.
|
| It's just a bad environment and to top it off, even if you have a
| PhD many will see you as "less than."
| jltsiren wrote:
| While the academia has a lot of issues, software engineers
| should also adjust their expectations.
|
| First, if you choose to work for a non-profit, you should
| expect a huge pay cut. That's the way the society works. Or
| actually it's the opposite. If you work in a for-profit role,
| the society allows your employer to keep most of the value you
| create. If you create a lot of value, that gives you the
| leverage to negotiate much higher compensation than your peers
| in less profitable roles.
|
| Second, like in any business, you should focus on what brings
| the money in if you want to advance your career. You should be
| the PI instead of the lab technician. Instead of building the
| software other people ask, you should become an expert in the
| field and build the software other people will need in the
| future. For example, bioinformatics as a whole used to be more
| of a support role, but today there are many high-profile
| bioinformatics PIs.
|
| Third, many people in the industry fail to realize that you
| don't really work for your employer in the academia. You work
| to build a reputation for yourself, which makes you valuable to
| the employer. If you want to continue working for other people,
| the upward career path from support roles goes to the
| administration.
| lliamander wrote:
| > Third, many people in the industry fail to realize that you
| don't really work for your employer in the academia. You work
| to build a reputation for yourself, which makes you valuable
| to the employer.
|
| That feels like how it works outside of academia as well.
| jltsiren wrote:
| There is a huge difference: Universities don't do reseach,
| and they don't care about the research their employees do.
| If you switch jobs, your old employer doesn't hire anyone
| to continue your research. Instead, you usually take your
| project to your new job.
|
| In the industry, your employer tends to own the projects
| you work on.
| arvinsim wrote:
| My apologies for not being familiar with acronyms, but what
| is a PI?
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Principal Investigator, the feudal lord who has near total
| power over the post docs and total power over the grad
| students in their lab. They can ruin your career at will
| and will almost certainly suffer no consequences whatsoever
| from doing so.
| Frost1x wrote:
| >First, if you choose to work for a non-profit, you should
| expect a huge pay cut.
|
| It may be the culture in some ecosystems but it's entirely
| false. A nonprofit can pay competitively with organizations
| of its size. I've worked at nonprofits and I've seen this
| line towed far too many times as an excuse to lower labor
| costs for people producing value for the organization. If
| your nonprofit is service oriented in anyway and requires
| people, appropriately investing in those people through their
| compensation and WLB is an appropriate investment.
|
| In theory, a nonprofit should be able to outperform and
| outpay a for-profit entity of the same size, largely because
| there shouldn't be an expectation of the organization to cut
| a big slice out to investors but instead to invest back into
| itself. This could mean increased hiring, grabbing top
| talent, investing back in a cause and so on.
| jltsiren wrote:
| While some non-profits may be able to pay competitive
| wages, especially for people whose skills are not in high
| demand, that's definitely not true for most of them. In
| general, non-profits don't compete directly with for-profit
| businesses. They are far more likely to serve niches where
| for-profit businesses are not viable for one reason or
| another.
|
| Very often, the level of funding is what it is and the non-
| profit has very little control over it. If you choose to
| pay higher salaries, you get less work done. This is common
| in the academia, which is usually funded by taxes and
| tuition fees.
|
| Sometimes there is even an inverse correlation between
| funding and salaries. If a charity chooses to pay higher
| salaries, its "administrative costs" increase. Donations
| may then dry up, because people consider the charity
| inefficient.
|
| Many non-profits rely extensively on volunteer labor.
| Salaried professionals often contribute their time and
| expertise to a worthy cause for free. That puts paid
| employees in an awkward position. It's hard to argue that
| you deserve a higher salary when the market rate for your
| services is 0.
| ElevenPhonons wrote:
| That was my experience as well.
|
| The RSE role doesn't seem to fit into their current model. It
| doesn't work from a career path, nor from a competitive
| compensation standpoint.
|
| I suspect that the housing crisis is also going to push more
| people out of these positions.
|
| If you have a PhD in material science, physics, chemistry,
| biology, etc... and are reasonably knowledgable in Python (or
| similar), perhaps spend a year as a postdoc. After that year,
| seriously consider moving to a tech company.
| maxwell86 wrote:
| > even if you have a PhD many will see you as "less than."
|
| Inside academia and outside of it.
|
| Inside academia you are not on a tenure track or similar, and
| will have to put up with a lot.
|
| Outside academia, your peers will be making 3x or more than
| you, working less hours, with less stress, etc.
|
| The reason RSE's jobs are hard to fill and often aren't even
| opened is that they don't make sense. If you are good enough
| for an RSE job, you will be good enough for research postions
| at FAANG. Those pay 10x more, so you also need someone willing
| to not accept that 10x pay, and also willing to work double the
| hours.
|
| RSEs making a reasonable pay for the skills they require make
| no sense either, because that would put your pay at 2x that of
| professors, etc.
| robbomacrae wrote:
| I'm curious which company pays a RS 10x more than a SE/RSE.
| I've found its usually SE/RSE's that make a bit more than
| RS's but I've never seen an RSE comp significantly outweigh
| an SE unless its in ML/Crypto.
|
| On that note I wish levels.fyi had RS and RSE roles...
| epgui wrote:
| 10x is possible, but maybe 3-5x is more realistic (even for
| non-FAANG).
| adw wrote:
| 10x more than academia. I'm a PhD in mineral physics turned
| Big Four MLE via startups and I earn about 10x what I would
| be on if I had stayed on the academic track.
| exdsq wrote:
| This isn't totally crazy but it's only if you stretch the
| facts enough. An RSE at Oxford will earn 32k GBP, like a
| postdoc. In theory, that person could be so good they could
| get the highest starting salary possible at a Tier 1 paying
| company like a research engineer at Hudson River Trading,
| which can be > 320k TC. So it's possible but only for a
| very very small number of people. 3x-5x is much more
| likely.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| > highest starting salary possible at a Tier 1 paying
| company like a research engineer at Hudson River Trading,
| which can be > 320k TC.
|
| You don't have to be at a "tier 1 paying company" to
| exceed 320k TC, that's easily achievable at any tech
| company that has gone public in the NYC metro or Bay
| Area. TC at a FAANG (MANGA or whatever they're calling
| it) for a more senior IC role can easily cross the $500k
| mark. If you've been their awhile and have been accruing
| shares that have increased dramatically in value,
| crossing the 7 figure mark is not unheard of.
|
| So you don't have to stretch the facts too much to
| realistically achieve the 10x. If you take two very
| qualified engineer graduating with a PhD, one chooses to
| go to Google and stay there the other goes to a
| university and works as an RSE. Fast forward a decade,
| you'll definitely be seeing a 10x difference in total
| comp.
| exdsq wrote:
| Oh after a decade sure. I was just interviewing with Meta
| for > $500k TC so totally believe it. I meant immediately
| after a PhD.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| If RSEs are actually valuable but under-compensated, can
| someone please disrupt this industry?
|
| Would love to see more startup medicine development companies
| ...
|
| Alternatively, would it make sense to provide RSE services as a
| company, for very high hourly rates, separately from the rest
| of the university, so status and rules are less of a problem?
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| There are a few like these:
|
| 1. Benchling 2. Enable Medicine 3. Radix.bio
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The reason they're under-compensated is that they aren't
| valued, unfortunately. A lot of scientists are self taught
| programmers and don't know what they don't know. The other
| issue is that if you say you should spend half your
| departments budget on hiring much better paid software
| developers, it looks really bad:
|
| a. You're implying your colleagues are incompetent.
|
| b. You can't use that money for "science".
|
| c. It puts in painful relief that the software guys are much
| better paid than you are, implying that their work is more
| valuable than yours. But a lot of scientists put up with low
| pay because they believe their work is really valuable.
| tonto wrote:
| your premise is that it's not being sold right but maybe you
| just need more people to give their perspective. I might be
| considered a research software engineer in the US. In my job, I
| get paid (well) to develop open source software for data
| visualization, and I work remotely. I get to maintain existing
| tools and develop new ones. there is an interesting global
| community that asks questions daily, and I am constantly
| learning. I'm not working under the thumb of overbearing
| people, just delivering results and contributing to new grant
| goals to continue the funding. these positions are not
| necessarily common, but are interesting and cool.
| FlyingRobot wrote:
| I'll offer another positive perspective. I've worked as a
| software engineer within the Department of Energy's National
| Laboratory System for 15 years, and I really enjoy it.
| Software is a major element of much of the laboratory's work,
| and in some cases such as mine software is the main product.
| We enjoy autonomy, lead projects as PIs, and develop mostly
| open source software. We are also hiring https://nrel.wd5.myw
| orkdayjobs.com/NREL/2/refreshFacet/318c8....
| artwr wrote:
| I will second this. The national labs are definitely some
| of the places who know what to do with research software
| engineers and treat them right for the most part. The
| Computer Systems Engineers and Software Engineers I had the
| chance to meet at LBNL had a decent amount of autonomy and
| were very good.
| Azrael3000 wrote:
| There is simply no incentive for science to do proper software
| engineering. It does not directly produce papers or money, so
| nobody does it. I've seen it several times in my own career in
| several countries.
|
| PhDs having their own version of the code, incompatible with
| the one of the Postdoc sitting opposite of them. Each slaving
| away at their niche project but nobody there to bring it all
| together. This particular university had really great code and
| they thought they could sell it. But they did not even use git
| and when I gave a presentation there about it, I was met with
| absolute rejection. They don't have an idea on how much effort
| it takes to maintain a commercial code, unit tests, customer
| support etc.
|
| I'm now working at a company that produces simulation software
| spun out from university. Fantastic job and we do all of those
| things mentioned above. But obviously my paper output has been
| near zero even though we sometimes do cutting edge research.
|
| I wish I had a solution to the problem as so much grant money
| is wasted that produces a paper or two and the corresponding
| software for that just goes to digital nirvana, it's a real
| shame.
| joshvm wrote:
| RSEs should not be working on, or assisting, research at the
| PhD level. By that I mean news/skunkworks stuff. They should
| be taking the output from a PhD and turning it into core
| software for the group. That doesn't solve the collaboration
| issue between PhDs/Postdocs, but there is a particular point
| in a research project lifecycle where it makes sense to hire
| an RSE.
|
| A bigger challenge is that most PIs are not project managers
| and have no experience as such, so they don't know how to
| express what they need in a structured way, or how to steer
| their group to collaborate properly. Outside computer
| science, many would struggle to budget software development
| or compute properly on a grant application (and the assessors
| have zero idea either).
| elementalest wrote:
| RSE's can and often absolutely should be involved at the
| PhD level. In my experience, collaboration between the
| scientist and engineer in the process of research
| iterations almost always produce better results. Each has
| insights the other may not, likely leading to better
| outcomes for the research, final product/tool and time
| taken.
|
| The scientist just wants to focus on their research and
| once they have a barely working proof of concept, hand it
| over to the engineer to figure the rest out. The engineer
| wants a well specified design and prototype that they can
| lightly refactor to clean up, scale up and turn into a
| product/tool.
|
| The reality is that approach makes it way harder for both,
| though most often harder for the engineer as they are
| generally at the end of the chain in Academia and have
| little power. For example, the code or spec from the
| scientist is often terrible, so the engineer needs to start
| from scratch and keep going back to the scientist to spec
| out the design as they were not involved at any stage
| prior. They may even find edge cases or flaws the scientist
| had not considered that are fundamentally problematic to
| turning it into a viable product/tool.
|
| This is why the big corporate/industry research labs often
| have high level RSE that are involved in the research
| process and get their names in papers (they sometimes have
| PhD's themselves). They are not optimising for the
| scientists time, but for the companies resources
| joshvm wrote:
| Yeah let me be clear. PhD students _absolutely_ should
| get guidance from experienced engineers (so I was a bit
| over-zealous with "assist" in my parent post). But this
| should be more like understanding best practices, and
| they should feel free to ask questions and figure out how
| to write better code. There are initiatives to do this
| called Software Carpentry.[0] However, RSEs should not be
| writing code for students doing PhD level projects in my
| opinion, for exactly the reasons you mention.
|
| I know some of the big research councils do this in the
| UK. For example STFC has a program where they'll work
| with universities and companies to production-ise
| research code.
|
| > The scientist just wants to focus on their research and
| once they have a barely working proof of concept, hand it
| over to the engineer to figure the rest out. The engineer
| wants a well specified design and prototype that they can
| lightly refactor to clean up, scale up and turn into a
| product/tool.
|
| As you say, this is a great idea in principle. In reality
| I think that it's really difficult to make it work.
|
| [0] https://www.software.ac.uk/programmes-
| events/carpentries/sof...
| elementalest wrote:
| I don't think its about best practices, its about good
| design and communication. Even if we are just talking
| about PhD students, the majority of them are fresh
| graduates. They are no different than fresh grads in a
| company. Those grads work with experienced senior
| software engineers to guide them and provide design
| advice (not just best practices). Those engineers are
| often the ones writing the complex/difficult areas of
| code.
|
| > RSEs should not be writing code for students doing PhD
| level projects in my opinion
|
| So should a mechanical engineer PhD be designing and
| making all their own robot parts? Or should the shop
| engineer help them? The few mechanical engineer PhD's in
| robotics I know made a few early prototype test parts
| themselves with help from the shop engineer, but the shop
| engineer made and even helped design most of it,
| especially the final prototype.
|
| > As you say, this is a great idea in principle. In
| reality I think that it's really difficult to make it
| work.
|
| The point I'm making is that it does work and its proven
| to work very well (which is why the major industry labs
| do it). In my experience its Academia that doesn't like
| it. Anything which appears to take power/freedom away
| from scientists and gets in the road of their research is
| rejected. Though I think the core reason is (as other
| comments have mentioned), there is no incentive for
| Academia to make it work. The funny thing is that having
| a RSE working with them would actually help the
| scientists in the long run and allow them to focus more
| on the research because they wouldn't have to do
| everything themselves.
| joshvm wrote:
| > I don't think its about best practices, its about good
| design and communication.
|
| I would argue these should be included in best practices
| for software engineering.
|
| > So should a mechanical engineer PhD be designing and
| making all their own robot parts? Or should the shop
| engineer help them? The few mechanical engineer PhD's in
| robotics I know made a few early prototype test parts
| themselves with help from the shop engineer, but the shop
| engineer made and even helped design most of it,
| especially the final prototype.
|
| This is an interesting example. Every mechanical engineer
| I know has _huge_ respect for their in-house machine
| shops. Everyone has a story about some design they
| submitted for fabrication, only to be told by the
| machinist that their design was terrible and they should
| do it another way. Generally machining jobs are very
| well-defined though, you have to submit CAD documents,
| tolerances etc.
|
| The shops in universities I've worked in have a strong
| incentive to help people optimise designs because they're
| the ones doing the manufacturing, and they know what sort
| of things will work and what won't. But by and large this
| is informal. Usually this comes in the form of "have you
| thought about designing this another way, because this is
| really difficult/expensive/time-consuming to machine".
| Maybe this is just a cultural thing for machinists?
|
| The PhD question - if your project is to design a new
| type of part then you should probably do the design.
| Should you _make_ it though? It depends if the project is
| specifically looking at fabrication. Otherwise it 's
| normal to dispatch this to a workshop.
|
| In my opinion, it comes down to what your PhD is training
| you for or what you're hired to do as a postdoc. If your
| job is data analysis, then I think you should be writing
| code, but you should be able to get guidance and support.
| If you're a field biologist with no coding experience and
| you want to develop an app to take measurements, then
| that's a case when contracting it out to an in-house
| development team makes sense. I'm not saying it can't
| work, but the _make_ in making it work is important.
|
| If you incentivize RSE's properly then their time will
| become expensive and we need ways of figuring out how to
| maximise their impact.
| Azrael3000 wrote:
| Well I think the best way would be for RSEs to maintain a
| project and PhDs should then contribute to that project
| via pull requests. RSEs can then point towards proper
| coding styles, test development, etc.
|
| That would ensure that the contributions of the PhDs does
| not get lost and they learn how to properly contribute to
| a project.
| joshvm wrote:
| See my sibling comment on this. I think this is an ideal
| case for an RSE: if you have a shared codebase that ends
| up being contributed to by multiple members. That avoids
| legacy problems where someone contributes, leaves,
| someone else modifies, none of it is in source control
| etc. However, this assumes that you have a group that is
| structured around some common IP or library - and sure,
| there are lots of places where this applies. This is
| generally more mature research, not something that a PhD
| student has just come up with.
|
| There are of course scenarios where someone comes up with
| some very high impact work, and there's an obvious need
| to make it robust or user-friendly, spin-out, etc.
|
| It works less well for groups where everyone works on
| different or loosely related projects. That's not an
| efficient use of an RSE's time, in my opinion. Though of
| course you can have a situation where lots of people do
| random projects _using_ the lab 's core code. In both
| cases, there is a use-case where RSEs embedded in a
| university can train students on good coding practices.
| aqme28 wrote:
| > They should be taking the output from a PhD and turning
| it into core software for the group.
|
| And what if the PhD's output relies on software to even
| exist?
| joshvm wrote:
| The challenge is that usually PhDs are not writing
| software that's designed for production, is very specific
| (for a single conference or journal paper) and often the
| utility of the code is nebulous until the end of the
| project. So what you don't want is for RSE's to spend
| ages writing code for a PhD project (which could be done
| by the student) only to have it thrown in the trash when
| the student leaves, or when they pivot to a new avenue of
| research.
|
| I'm saying this as someone who did a PhD and who wrote a
| lot of code, including refactoring legacy codebases in my
| group.
|
| Where the utility in having an RSE lies is where the
| group is all using some shared codebase that gets touched
| by everyone. This is the sort of cruft that I had to work
| with: legacy frankencode that generations of students and
| postdocs had added to. It would have made a ton of sense
| to pay someone to spend a year optimising it (which is
| ultimately what I did). But you want to make sure that
| RSE's maximise utility in the group. Having them work on
| individual student projects is not an effective use of
| their time IMO.
| [deleted]
| myst1 wrote:
| One could argue that bad software engineering practices are
| rewarded by academia. If no one can follow your work you
| drive away competition so why write comments. If you
| regularly refactor your work no one can use your API but you.
| Not unit testing ensures that code is cryptic, and people
| will have a hard time refuting your claims due to errors. The
| list goes on and on.
| soco wrote:
| I'd say it depends a lot on the environment you'd be landing.
| I was hired to cleanup some clean room software and boy did
| it need cleanup. Simply by implementing some best practices
| and pretty much all what today goes as devops (this was 15
| years ago in Switzerland) the thing got so speedy that a
| company got interested in buying it, so my contract was
| extended to add the final perks to close that sale. I refused
| the offer to join the buyer company and that was it for me.
| Ah and my name landed second on a paper, the only non-PhD on
| the list. All in all it was an exciting stunt while the pay
| was in line with what others said - 30% under the market
| average (they were even surprised why I wanted it).
| w0de0 wrote:
| Is there any solution to be found through analogy with
| established fields' relationship between engineering and
| research disciplines? How, for instance, do physicists share
| formal models which rocket engineers might apply? Certainly
| the physicists aren't out developing unit tests for engines
| which apply their theory, but nor are the engineers
| exasperated by physicists rejecting their standardized tools
| (I imagine?).
| Azrael3000 wrote:
| Well from experience the interface is conferences and
| papers. On conferences you get to know the latest stuff
| that is going on and the implementation details can be
| found in papers.
|
| What needs to be said though is that reimplementing
| something from a paper is near impossible. I had to do that
| a couple of times and I was only fully successful if the
| paper was accompanied by some open source code as there
| always are tiny little edge cases or initialization details
| that won't be covered in the paper.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| The goal of research scientists is rarely to produce a
| finished and polished product. Instead, they aim to prove
| some concept/algorithm/technique/etc.
|
| They are almost always time and resource strapped, so it
| becomes a near necessity to deprioritize factors like
| readability and maintainability.
|
| Still, many RSEs could immensely benefit from applying basic
| best practices.
| exdsq wrote:
| This isn't completely true. My wife is a postdoc at a medical
| lab at Stanford and there's a big drive to push good software
| practices - containerisation, tests, documentation, etc...
| and a good friend who's a postdoc in medical imaging at
| Oxford runs training courses for their labs software (along
| with following all standard engineering practices you'd see
| at a company). This will be subjective of where you're
| working and if you're driven to write good software. With the
| reproducibility issues in science, writing good clear
| software is becoming more important.
| Azrael3000 wrote:
| Of course my statement wasn't meant to be absolute. I come
| from an engineering background. I am not surprised that in
| a medical setting the situation is somewhat different,
| after all I guess the stakes there are higher. If your CFD
| code does not perform well, who cares. If your analysis of
| some medication is crap, chances somebody cares is going to
| be much higher.
|
| Also from experience, it helps if universities have closer
| ties to industry. As an industrial player you can't work
| with software that does not deliver reproducible results.
| sea-shunned wrote:
| I'll agree that there is increasing emphasis on
| reproducibility and _useable_ software in academia. Writing
| documentation, unit tests etc. is still not really rewarded
| properly, but at least within the current paradigm such
| efforts are often rewarded with more users (and therefore
| citations) which is rewarded. Soon, hopefully, it'll be
| recognised more directly.
|
| Also, I'm currently a postdoc in medical imaging at UCL,
| super interested in learning a little more about the group
| in Oxford you mentioned if you're OK with sharing a
| link/group name? I may be able to guess but just want to
| check!
| xmzx wrote:
| Sounds exactly like industry.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > good software practices
|
| > containerisation
|
| Pick one.
| de6u99er wrote:
| Apart from compensation and freedom you also get micro managed
| by someone who might know about the science part, but is really
| bad on the software architecture and engineering part.
| mywaifuismeta wrote:
| The last point is important. In my experience it's mostly about
| status. RSEs are always seen as inferior to researchers
| (research scientists) who supposedly come up with the "big
| ideas" while RSEs merely implement the stuff they're told to
| do.
|
| In reality the line is much blurrier. There can be no
| innovation and iteration without implementation of ideas and
| the RSE work is just as important.
|
| But unless this view changes, nobody wants to be an RSE.
| captaincaveman wrote:
| I'd argue the position of software engineers/ programmers
| being those that implement the thinking of the
| business/science thinkers isn't unique to academia.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, I think RSE is often viewed as a laboratory assistant.
| auxym wrote:
| Not just viewed, but literally called an assistant in the
| official title.
|
| I am a licensed professional engineer (mechanical) and I
| work in academia (though my work is varied and does involve
| some code), my official title (in french) is "Professionnel
| de recherche", which translates to Research Professional.
| It is my understanding that in most of the english-speaking
| world, this position (someone that works for a research
| lab, who is qualified above the technician level, but not a
| PI nor a postdoc or student) is called "Research
| Assistant".
|
| I write "Research Engineer" on my resume/linkedin, because
| TBH for most people who don't have much experience in
| academia, "Research Assistant" sounds like an admin
| assistant (secretary).
| lliamander wrote:
| I actually wouldn't mind being lower status than the
| scientists, so long as my particular expertise was respected
| and I had a reasonable degree of autonomy within my domain.
|
| I did tech support at a university for a bit. I certainly
| wasn't as high status as the professors, but they mostly
| respected me and the value I provided (especially when you do
| things like help them recover that next book they were
| working on, or whatever).
| JetAlone wrote:
| According to a quick search for the case of researchers, and
| the stereotype of most staff in academia across the board
| being underpaid, this means academic researchers would have
| even less incentives/perks/reward, because now they have one
| less beneficial status differential.
|
| Is there some way to make human respect feel like it's not a
| zero sum game? The world may never know.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > Is there some way to make human respect feel like it's
| not a zero sum game?
|
| Respect is non zero sum but status is definitionally a
| positional good. If you're number 1 someone else isn't.
| There can be uncertainty about status but ambiguity always
| collapses eventually. Everyone can be treated with respect
| but there will be a prestige or dominance hierarchy in any
| group of humans, subtle as it may be.
| ehnto wrote:
| Absolutely, but I will give them the hand that achieving a good
| software dev experience is extremely hard inside a uni. There
| is a number of ways that they need to match the industry and
| are having a tough time doing so due to the
| institutionalization of all the adjacent processes.
| cameldrv wrote:
| IME that's all true. To say that they need to do more to create
| a more positive environment for research engineers though
| depends on the perspective.
|
| From the perspective of the university and the PI, they can
| just get a graduate student to do the work for 1/5 the cost.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > From the perspective of the university and the PI, they can
| just get a graduate student to do the work for 1/5 the cost.
|
| That is what they do. However, some projects grow in scale
| where a grad student cannot handle it well, or if they try,
| it will be a detriment to their research. To give you an
| example, only one of the PhD students (non-CS engineering) in
| my group and the ones around me had taken data structures or
| algorithms - yet everyone's thesis was "computational" (i.e.
| numerical computation, etc). None of the advisors would
| appreciate their students going off and taking serious CS
| courses.
|
| When a research team wants to go to the next level, they need
| to hire someone with better SW skills.
| kimixa wrote:
| I certainly agree - it was about 10 years ago now, but I did a
| physics degree and ended up pivoting to computer science. I
| offered to help a couple of friends in the department with
| their analysis, and ended up writing the majority of their code
| in actually analysing their experimental results. In both
| cases, their supervisor decided not to put my name in the
| resulting papers, and treated me less than a lab tech.
|
| Why would anyone want to do that, when a six-figure tech
| company salary is just next door?
| travisgriggs wrote:
| This last point, and replies to this all seem to talk about the
| research industry. But it has been my experience that this same
| dynamic of being "less than" exists in any industry that is not
| primarily software.
|
| I am a mechanical engineer by degree, but a software engineer
| by 30 years of practice. That has allowed me to thrice straddle
| the divide where I worked on software that was not just
| software for softwares sake, but rather as a value add
| addendum/enablement to an institution whose roots were in more
| real-worldly devices. I also spent time on the other side of
| the divide working twice for companies whose primary product
| was software.
|
| This "less than" is a very real thing. Software is still a very
| new thing relatively and it's taken over the world in just 30
| years time. The power dynamics, entrenched in generations
| haven't had time to rebalance.
|
| I've seen this run the other way as well. Where companies that
| are primarily software, look down on the other disciplines that
| participate, a necessary evil, but resented.
|
| I have yet to find a company/institution where the trifecta of
| mechanical, electrical, and software is balanced in mutual
| respect. If one such exists and you are looking for someone
| that would love to work in that environment, drop me a line.
| I'm skeptical that there are any. It seems one discipline or
| the other always triumphs and tramples the others down. On off
| axis variant of Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy .
| [deleted]
| rytill wrote:
| Just curious, have you sampled many robotics companies? I
| have worked with dozens and it seems like there are some with
| well-balanced power dynamics between mechanical-electrical-
| software.
| fburnaby wrote:
| I believe this has less to do with software in particular and
| just generally reflects the typical dynamics of the
| line/staff distinction.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staff_and_line
| NoahKAndrews wrote:
| I sent you an email too, but my employer REV Robotics
| definitely fits this description in my opinion, especially in
| regards to the software team's collaboration with the
| electrical team.
| softfalcon wrote:
| I have to agree that in some environments you can see comp
| sci majors picking on anyone who isn't part of traditional
| "software".
|
| I switched from engineering into comp sci at my university
| and I can safely say that the elitism for software was stoked
| by the elitism of engineering.
|
| While I was in engineering, everyone bragged about how they
| were going to get "The iron ring" (a thing we give to only
| engineers in Canada). When I switched over to comp sci, all
| my old engineering buddies would say to me, "yeah, but you
| don't get the ring" like it meant everything.
|
| After I graduated, I noticed the comp sci "software" folks
| didn't like engineering folks much (especially new grads).
| When I asked why, they shared similar stories to mine. The
| engineers and their pumped up pride at my local university
| had hurt their relation to other fields by being arrogant.
|
| I'm not trying to justify this kind of prejudice, but the
| reasons it happens are fairly obvious to me. It's sad cause
| all of us are so similar in our trades and will likely end up
| doing similar work as well.
| [deleted]
| asciimov wrote:
| I spent a few years as a RSE in the mid-2010's. Supporting people
| doing actual science is a rewarding job.
|
| The worst parts of that job are the same for every body in
| research that isn't a PI pulling in lots of grant money: low pay,
| terrible or non-existent benefits, bureaucracy ran by non-science
| people, making do with older equipment.
|
| There is also a breaking in period where you have to prove you
| are not a moron. Since you come from a different educational
| area, and most likely aren't as educated, this can take some time
| and effort.
|
| The best part of the job: getting to work with highly educated
| people, getting to see science be discovered, being able to
| actually plan and execute projects because everything isn't on
| fire, regular business hours with no after hours support calls.
| itsmeacupoftea wrote:
| I can only speak for how it appears in my country (Australia),
| but it seems like university academic staffing models in general
| are broken. I have 15+ years experience in service providers in
| Cybersecurity and SE roles. I have 2 Masters degrees with GPA7/HD
| averages, and love to teach. There is nothing I'd love more than
| to teach university level topics with a primary teaching focus,
| and research as a secondary. It's not about the money - they can
| pay me less than the Australian average wage and I'll be happy.
|
| Over the last 2 years I've interviewed at multiple universities
| for Level A (Associate Lecturer) and they all had similar
| requirements that I've summarized below:
|
| > you must have completed a PHD. > You must propose and perform
| original research, assist in upper level academics research, and
| publish X times per year. > you must participate in fundraising,
| complete your own grant applications and assist upper level
| academics in their fundraising & applications. > you must
| supervise and advise X number of postgraduate students
| thesis/dissertations. > you must teach both undergraduate and
| graduate level classes across 3 trimesters. > the position is
| fixed term for 12 months, rather than ongoing/permanent, with no
| job security and you are required to reapply each year.
|
| Most current academics I know from Level A to Level E, say they
| don't particularly want to teach, and just wish they could focus
| on their research and fundraising to support their research. I
| met other applicants at networking and alumni events like myself
| who would like a teaching focus, rather than a research focus.
| There's a supply of "specialists", but an insistence on
| "generalists". As the fixed term aspect tends to apply to
| research fellows as well, the risk from the lack of security
| combined with the extremely low pay makes it very difficult to
| enter, and remain, in academia. I can afford to live on $65k a
| year, but the possibility that every year I may be faced with
| periods of unemployment and the requirement to relocate thousands
| of km away makes it a challenging prospect.
| aragilar wrote:
| It comes down to teaching not bringing in money-- _enrolments_
| (either domestic via the government, or paying international
| students) and grants bring in money (those requirements are
| basically "can bring in grants/other funding"). Even with
| ongoing positions, things like COVID (or even a change of
| focus) can cause the positions to end (and the ability to bring
| in grants would play a key roll in who stays and who goes). Any
| substantial change in the model is a matter for government, not
| the unis.
| H8crilA wrote:
| They will have more than enough once/if the tech valuations melt
| down and with them the software engineer salaries.
| micheles wrote:
| I work as a research engineer in Italy. My path was academia
| (Physics)->industry (Finance)->mix. The "mix" where I am now is a
| strange case: it is located inside an university, nearly
| everybody has a PhD and we also have PhD students, but we are not
| academia, it is a private no profit company doing applied
| research. I am getting the same money I was getting in the
| industry but also 7+ weeks of vacation per year, more autonomy
| and less stress. Plus, I am not working to make rich people
| richer.
|
| Most of my job is about optimizing numeric code, lots of numpy,
| pandas, numba but also thinking of new algorithms. I get respect
| and they put my name in the research papers they publish, even if
| I did not write a word in the paper and have no knowledge at all
| of the underlying science ;-) Such companies are rare but they do
| exist. Much better than academia because there is no bureaucracy.
| I got in because of a friend of a friend...
| iamcurious wrote:
| Sounds heavenly, are they hiring?
| jleyank wrote:
| (Very) few research groups can fund a commercial grade software
| engineer. Unless they're intending to sell the software, it might
| not even be sensible to do so - like hiring another nmr
| specialist or whatever. These would be considered departmental
| support staff and groups could bid for their services. Chem
| departments used to have staff modellers for this, but the $$ in
| industry sucked them all away.
|
| Coding somebody else's problem lacks status in academia, and the
| money is poor. Why would people do this as a career?
| robbomacrae wrote:
| This hit pretty close to home for me, as I started as a
| programming oriented PhD and then transitioned into a SV full
| software engineer over 10 years. I am exactly like they mentioned
| "Many RSEs started out as PhD students or postdocs who worked on
| software to support their own project. They realized that they
| enjoyed that part of the job more than the actual research."
|
| I think the advice in the interview is pretty sound. OSS is a
| great way to contribute and become in demand.
|
| But the main issue here is that there are not enough RSE's. "If
| RSEs can get the recognition and rewards that they deserve, then
| the career path will be that much more visible and attractive."
|
| Here are my two cents:
|
| 1) Academia will never compete in salary with big tech (except
| maybe in the big Ivy League schools). Universities should promote
| spin offs, help with patents, run regular hackathons and an
| incubator program. That will give engineers an incentive to at
| least start their career in an academic lab.
|
| 2) Some of the best science happens in startups and org x labs,
| not just academia. But even here I found there are very few
| companies that value an RSE. You're either an RS, or an SE and
| the extra R or E is in title only. They will see you as a
| researcher who knows a bit of python, or as an engineer who
| wasted years in graduate school. You will be interviewed as one
| or the other. You will be paid as one or the other. I've never
| seen a company appreciate the value of fully grokking or
| contributing to the researchers algorithms and Jupiter notebooks
| and then architecting an efficient implementation at scale. You
| will also be kept in your swim lane. Researcher? Can't touch the
| production systems. Engineer? Good luck getting a patent
| application going. If there is a hiring manager out there reading
| this... please consider making a true RSE interview and role.
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| Well, it's a bit difficult when these positions require a degree.
|
| It's a problem with research institutes that they consider
| themselves academics and look down on people with extensive work
| experience.
| kemiller wrote:
| Most industries outside of the actual tech industry treat
| software engineers as low level technicians, pay and promote them
| accordingly, and then complain they can't find anyone competent.
| Academia is that plus some of the worst internal culture you've
| ever seen. The work can be fascinating but unless you've already
| got fuck you money and just want something to do, stay away.
| dekhn wrote:
| So much to say. I went through the whole academic cycle and moved
| to industry... about 15 years ago. I can't put it any other way
| than: the professors and PIs are abusing their employees. It has
| worked for some time because there were always enough people
| ultra-motivated to work in science for the prestige and other
| perks, but now, the economy is such that people can no longer do
| that (science job + family + mortgage = unhappy).
|
| The right way to think about this is in terms of long-term
| politics and the success of nations. If you disincentivize
| national research, your country will fare worse than its
| competitors. For me, that's the US- if the US doesn't turn around
| the incentive systems for doing high quality academic research in
| the national interest, we will eventually be at an economic
| disadvantage to China.
| marysnovirgin wrote:
| 100% correct. The professors and PIs abuse their employees, and
| the institution completely supports it. It's the business plan.
| j7ake wrote:
| Research software engineers should be PIs themselves so they can
| choose what they want to work on, who to work with, and hire
| trainees to mentor the next generation of research software
| engineers.
|
| RSEs are a different breed from SEs from industry, the work is
| not about scaling to a billion people but being nimble and
| adaptive to new results and ideas.
|
| If one wants to see change, then hire senior PI positions who do
| research software engineering. This will help create a hub and
| prevent the feeling of being a "pet" in an experimental lab.
| User23 wrote:
| The easy fix is to move software devs into the administration
| department and pay them administrator salaries.
| toma_caliente wrote:
| It's already been said several times over but I'm going to throw
| it out anyway. I'd love to work at a university as a research
| software engineer. I find things like bioinformatics fascinating
| and even interviewed at a research university on the east coast.
| But, you will get paid SIGNIFICANTLY less than you would doing
| almost anything else, have zero autonomy, and get no respect.
| Those 3 things are basically what most people look for in a job.
| david_l_lin wrote:
| >you will get paid SIGNIFICANTLY less than you would doing
| almost anything else
|
| Definitely true.
|
| >have zero autonomy
|
| Might be true? But in the right research group, this is
| definitely not true. I actually find that I had far more
| autonomy in academia than in industry. There are far fewer
| deadlines, less time pressure, and more curiosity-driven
| projects that are entirely owned by you.
|
| >and get no respect
|
| Might be true, but I find a lot of people in industry feel they
| get no respect as well. As an academic, I actually found that I
| respected academics more than I did people in industry. Though
| this is entirely anecdotal.
|
| I was an academic until my 30s before going to industry, and
| actually find that the autonomy is the number one reason people
| like academia. YOU drive the projects because only YOU know the
| research that deeply. YOU get to be at the forefront, and YOU
| know things nobody else might ever know, until you get to share
| them through publications and presentations. Academic projects
| have essentially no deadline (projects are on multi-year long
| timescales rather than quarters or months in industry).
| Gatsky wrote:
| The pay and autonomy will never improve, I can tell you that
| now. That's the reality of the current system.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I'm certain the respect will not improve either. There may be
| steps made to improve it but they won't stick.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > But, you will get paid SIGNIFICANTLY less than you would
| doing almost anything else
|
| Yes definitely true, a junior software engineer in industry
| earns about as much as a Professor in academia. How would you
| justify such a salary at the university?
|
| > have zero autonomy,
|
| I've written that before. I would argue it's the complete
| opposite, autonomy is the one big advantage of academia. If you
| are a software engineer you likely have even more autonomy than
| most others, because your work is not directly linked to
| conference/grant deadlines etc. typically you would be given
| very rough guidelines on what you should try to achieve and
| then left to your own devices for long periods of time. Most
| PIs would neither have the time or expertise to micromanage a
| software engineer.
|
| > and get no respect.
|
| Again not my experience at all. I know that in my area people
| would respect a software engineer. I know when my partner was
| working as a research assistant in a medical lab, I wrote a
| small script to process some huge spreadsheet that they always
| processed by hand (work that took sometimes several weeks).
| They treated me like a god and even wanted to include me on the
| paper. The thing to remember though is you will not be
| considered a researcher, so likely not get grant funding and
| your job progression would always be in more technical roles,
| not in the academic track. I still don't see any difference in
| respect.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| >> and get no respect. > not my experience at all
|
| Respect could mean different things to different people, but
| I find the things you wrote not to be very respectful, but
| being nice in my evaluation.
|
| I have worked in a research lab. While the folks I worked
| with respected my work, what I would actually consider
| respectful is including me in the design of the work, not
| giving me my part of work after they designed the thing they
| want to work on. And while most job industry is not good in
| this respect, working in research lab is worse than that.
| Almost all research labs treats SWE like cost center[0].
|
| [0]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-
| a-pr...
| cycomanic wrote:
| > Respect could mean different things to different people,
| but I find the things you wrote not to be very respectful,
| but being nice in my evaluation.
|
| > I have worked in a research lab. While the folks I worked
| with respected my work, what I would actually consider
| respectful is including me in the design of the work, not
| giving me my part of work after they designed the thing
| they want to work on. And while most job industry is not
| good in this respect, working in research lab is worse than
| that. Almost all research labs treats SWE like cost
| center[0].
|
| I don't quite understand your point, do you mean that you
| as an SRE want to be involved in the grant being written?
| That might be appropriate if the grant is directly on the
| topic of software, but completely inappropriate if the SRE
| writes the labautomation software to be used in the grant.
| So if the researcher asks you to write a GUI to some lab-
| instrument for example is that being disrespectful?
|
| Regarding your citation, I also don't get it. The text says
| that MBAs consider SWEs as cost centers, so that implies
| it's worse in industry (there's very few MBAs running
| research labs). I can also tell you that academics are
| largely considered cost centres by university admin.
| suslik wrote:
| You can do all type of flavour of bioinformatics in industry as
| well; in fact, the profession is so undersaturated it is really
| easy for a qualified individual to lend a nice R&D position in
| big or small pharma or biotech.
| philomath_mn wrote:
| > Those 3 thing are basically what most people look for in a
| job.
|
| When you put it that way, it makes it so clear why nobody wants
| to sign up
|
| (BTW I'm the same way, would love to work on research,
| especially if it is something which could improve people's
| lives, but I'd have a hard time switching for these reasons)
| jknoepfler wrote:
| I haven't seen a single competetive job posting from a research
| institution in 10 years of software development, despite having
| the desire and acumen to seek them out. I don't expect that to
| change. If I care enough about a thorny research problem, I'll
| start my own company, do my own research, and maybe hire some
| academics as bargain-barrel contributors to do grunt analytics
| work... the last thing I'll do is join a research mill as a cost-
| center tech hire.
|
| "Most RSEs have a PhD"... talk about selecting aggressively for
| people with no experience building functional software. Hiring
| only PhDs to write research software smacks of hiring only white
| males who can drink and play golf to function as business
| executives. You're selecting for ability to posture, not deliver
| value.
| mikebenfield wrote:
| Getting a PhD (ie, passing an apprenticeship in how to do
| research in an academic setting) is a lot more strongly related
| to being a RSE than playing golf is to running a business.
| throwmamatrain wrote:
| This looks great, and I would have loved to see this when I was
| in the lab.
|
| When the software industry says to you: "We will nearly triple
| your salary, you don't have to work weekends, and you also don't
| have to feed the mice on a Sunday night."
|
| You will 100% take this deal.
|
| I was a 10yr+ academic tool maker in biochemistry, built cutting
| edge microscopes, hardware, and image analysis software. My lab
| was successful in our field. I got some papers out of the deal. I
| also saw things that no human had seen before in a microscope. I
| worked with very interesting people from around the world. The
| work in academia is great. You're moving the needle, new data,
| new failures. These are the perks. It is also highly possible
| that you have complete creative control of your project. I did,
| and it was amazing. Custom designed UIs to streamline our
| experiments, derived from watching students use the system to do
| their work. A decathalon of software design.
|
| Some reality: Your PI and organization will never compensate you
| the way the software industry will. In pay, expectations, and
| benefits. When you're over 30, and you don't technically have a
| real 401k, you are still paying your student loans that you
| needed to get into this field, and you're still in the same
| shitty apartment, something has to give.
|
| Comparison is the thief of joy, and when you see your cohort of
| computer science graduates your joy will be stolen :). It's good,
| honest work. A short tour of duty would be useful, and can teach
| you the difference between splitting the atom and splitting the
| check.
|
| Academia, at least in bioscience, is still very much an ivory
| tower. You don't have enough letters after your name to matter,
| and you will likely be a pet instead of a peer.
|
| Don't stay underwater for too long. Life is short. :D
| sokoloff wrote:
| I have some similar feelings about working for a game company
| (that was fairly successful and on the "better half" of the
| distribution of game companies).
|
| Loved the creative control and influence I could have (even as
| a mid-20s tech lead on a title), loved my colleagues, loved the
| work, and even enjoyed the satisfaction from shipping a golden
| master after a multi-week crunch period.
|
| Ultimately, a hedge fund was willing to pay me a multiple of
| what I was making in games and I decided I'd rather have a
| house than work on games.
| rob_c wrote:
| > at least in bioscience...
|
| BINGO! that field is notoriously horrible and interacts
| extremely badly with a 'when not discovered here, not
| important' syndrome. Biology is brutal toward bio-physicists,
| mathematicians as well as people who code who they are forced
| to work with rather than seek out to help them.
|
| I still hold up as an example nonsense discussions around
| p-values in bio vs actual work going on in statistics in maths
| departments. It shows how far detached they've become.
|
| Not to criticize too strongly, but given the above, combined
| with it's reproducabilty crisis, and existential problem of
| being in the back-pocket of big-pharma, I seriously doubt the
| professional integrity of a lot of people in the field.
|
| Move toward mathematics, physics and chemistry. There is (some)
| serious money and a good atmosphere around areas such as
| finite-element modelling, or wolphram like tools as an example.
| There is a lack of direct funding for decent posts but you get
| recognised and paid the equivalent as a peer, I know from
| working with some of these people. It's not to say it's 100%
| always without friction, but no job is I'd argue.
| willis936 wrote:
| The reproducabilty crisis in chemistry is just as bad, if not
| worse, than biology. Anyone with a pen can reproduce a math
| proof. If you work on a big project (physics experiment)
| where every paper has a dozen eyes on it you can't slip crap
| work by your peers because that's their livelihood on the
| line. In between you have bio/chem fields where each project
| is too expensive to trivially reproduce but still small
| enough to have only one career on the line for each project.
| myst1 wrote:
| Most of the reproducibility issues in chemistry happen in
| biochem in my experience(meanwhile it gets the most
| funding). That said, synthetic chemistry is also a problem
| area. Usually in synthetic chemistry it's not that the work
| can't be entirely reproduced, but rather that yields are
| fudged. That's mostly because PIs say "you can't graduate
| until this reaction yields 99%.". So after someone has
| written four papers, taught classes at minimum wage for 7
| years, they fudge a 95% to a 99%. It's not okay, but
| neither is the way academia is structured. Super glad my
| discipline was elsewhere, but I saw colleagues suffer from
| this stuff...
| mike_hearn wrote:
| _" Not to criticize too strongly, but given the above,
| combined with it's reproducabilty crisis, and existential
| problem of being in the back-pocket of big-pharma, I
| seriously doubt the professional integrity of a lot of people
| in the field."_
|
| Lack of professional integrity is a very real problem.
|
| Over the past two years I wrote fairly frequently about some
| of the nonsensical / pseudo-scientific COVID papers that got
| published, especially the quality problems in epidemiology.
| Epidemiology isn't bioscience (actually that's one of the
| problems with it - total lack of biology), but it's adjacent.
| After that I got contacted by a former research software
| engineer who worked with top epidemiology teams in the UK. I
| also got contacted by a member of the SAGE committee.
|
| Both of them told me some absolutely mind-blowing stories of
| ethical malpractice. I wasn't totally surprised because it
| was obvious that those sorts of things must have been going
| on behind the scenes just from reading their model source
| code, reports, watching their behavior etc. The RSE had
| become so disgusted at what he'd seen that he actually _left
| the country_ and switched from working at Oxford to some US
| university I 'd never heard of, switching fields along the
| way too. Quite the downgrade in prestige but after years of
| trying to help epidemiologists he concluded the entire field
| was utterly morally corrupt and he wanted nothing to do with
| it.
|
| Here are some of the more memorable things I was told by
| those two scientists:
|
| - The RSE at one point found a bug in a FORTRAN model being
| used to model malaria outbreaks. It had been used as the
| basis for hundreds of papers but at critical points was using
| pointer values as variables instead of dereferencing them.
| Obviously, a typical pointer has a very different value to
| most organic things (some FFI bug). He reported this bug to
| the authors and got a reply back within 30 minutes saying
| they'd checked the papers (all of them) and it didn't affect
| the results. This claim was very obviously a lie: not only
| could they not possibly have checked even one paper in 30
| minutes but he already knew fixing the bug did indeed change
| results! They didn't care and he was shocked that his
| "colleagues" would bullshit him so directly, especially as
| they must have known that he would know.
|
| - Same guy flagged code quality issues to some of the
| scientists and proposed introducing some rules designed to
| improve quality. He was dismissed with the words: "oh <name>,
| we're scientists, we don't write bugs".
|
| - The SAGE member told me about some of the internal
| discussions they had. Criticisms of the methodological
| validity and accuracies of their models were dismissed with
| reasoning like this: "that person reads the Spectator so it
| doesn't matter what they think". Relatedly, he made clear
| that the supposedly scientific SAGE predictions were
| sometimes being altered to reduce criticism of the group by
| left wing media and journalists. The changes were presented
| as "the science changed" but that wasn't what was going on
| behind the scenes.
|
| - Malaria research is (supposedly) being badly distorted by
| the Gates Foundation. Gates only cares about eradication
| which leads to lots of problems. There are some smaller ones,
| like many researchers don't genuinely believe that's possible
| but lie on their grant applications to make mitigation
| efforts sound like eradication efforts. And then there were
| unethical experiments on entire populations where e.g. whole
| areas are blanketed in anti-malarial drugs. If it works,
| great, you eradicated malaria in that area. If it doesn't you
| just selected for drug-resistant mosquitos and now the drugs
| that were being used only to treat the serious cases don't
| work for anyone. He told me this has actually happened more
| than once.
|
| - The RSE told me they'd at one point tried to recruit an RSE
| working with climatologists to help them with their modelling
| (a belief that climatologists are more rigorous than they are
| seems to be common in epidemiology). The RSE they interviewed
| refused to take the job. His reason was he was quitting
| academia entirely, as he was so disturbed by the practices
| he'd seen.
|
| A few years ago if you'd told me that a whole research field
| could be unethical I'd have thought you were crazy because,
| well, that's a whole lot of people being painted by a very
| broad brush. Now I've seen it for myself and heard from other
| former insiders, it's easy to see what happens - the honest
| ones discover what's happening and leave. Because academia
| hardly ever penalizes intellectual dishonesty, the pool of
| people who remain are the ones who are OK with it and have
| learned that it works / has no consequences. Things steadily
| become more and more toxic.
| rob_c wrote:
| I probably shouldn't go too public with what I know of
| report 9 that isn't on the record, but frankly next to no
| code from biologists has gone through peer review and
| people put "experts" on a pedastle because of what they
| claim their tools can do.
|
| What I can and will say (and is on record) is that
| reproducibility was not a concern from the Imperial College
| virology dept.
| throwmamatrain wrote:
| I would say that is a very strong criticism and very
| warranted! For note, I witnessed the immolation of two
| careers over retractions of papers that could not be
| replicated. You could say that the system worked. That was a
| while ago, and I'm sure the paper mill phenomenon is in full
| swing. You get echo chambers of PIs that rubber stamp each
| others work.
|
| In my case, I was in basic science which hit a crisis near
| 2008 when the NIH was flat funded. This caused a come to
| Jesus moment, where suddenly all basic science labs were
| rebranded as translational medicine. My department was
| absolutely gutted, down from 15 or so PIs to maybe 8ish in
| the span of a year. Our field was bioenergetics which at the
| time was pretty competitive, and easy to link to
| diseases/metabolic disorders. We didn't work with pharma,
| some labs received contracts for small work. NIH was by far
| the biggest funder, followed by DARPA and other smaller
| health organizations.
| myst1 wrote:
| No there isn't good money in physics and chemistry or pure
| math. PhD chemists almost never make 6 figures even in high
| cost of living areas serving as a specialist. I made less as
| a senior scientist or a project manager in chemistry than I
| do as an entry level software engineer. I don't know how many
| physicists I've met who work minimum wage jobs, usually call
| centers, after their PhD/post doc (even finding a PhD is
| difficult, let alone completing one in 6 years).
|
| FEM can offer money but you are competing against engineers
| who that's what they've done for years.
|
| If you interviewed software engineers and data scientists
| right now I bet a third of them once were physical
| scientists/mathematicians who mostly regret their degrees or
| the fact they can't find survivable work using them.
| coastflow wrote:
| >"I bet a third of them once were physical
| scientists/mathematicians who mostly regret their degrees"
|
| Would mathematicians truly be regretting their degrees, if
| they decide to work in software? I read that mathematics
| one of the best degrees for a career in software
| engineering, as computer science is very closely related to
| mathematics (to the point where studies of algorithms are
| largely the same for mathematics and computer science
| students).
| aqsalose wrote:
| Theoretical parts of computer science is connected to
| discrete mathematics, sure. But that is only a subfield
| of mathematics and mostly happens already at CS
| departments, so you'd get a CS degree anyway.
|
| It is also possible that aptitude for math is related to
| aptitude in software engineering.
|
| However: The mathematics content of 90%+ of mathematics
| degrees awarded is fully irrelevant to 95%+ of software
| development tasks. And when that 5% task needs that some
| kind special mathematical insight, the people who want
| that task done are going to get the top professional they
| can find for it. Maybe the prospective math student is
| going to be that professional, but I don't recommend
| planning a career for it.
|
| I am not saying there isn't work where some math is
| useful but the most commonly used applied stuff ... say,
| linear algebra ... is typically covered in a respectable
| engineering program; degree in mathematics would be
| superfluous. Proving theoretical properties of Hilbert
| spaces or measurable sets or bifurcations of dynamic
| systems or advances in differentiable topology or
| fascinating behavior of cellular automata or whatever is
| going to be gigantic waste of your time if you won't use
| it later in your career or you don't find it intrinsic
| motivation in itself.
| rob_c wrote:
| > "good money" apparently a very relative term, I think I'm
| in it for job satisfaction then at 5 figures, shame I'm a
| qualified expert.
| alaricus wrote:
| This is pretty much my story as well. I work less and get paid
| much more after leaving academia. Idealism can last so long
| before one gives in.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| The converse is something akin to Tableau, which came out of
| the graphics department of Stanford and Pat Hanrahan's lab.
| Tableau was acquired by Salesforce for around $15B. No doubt,
| proximity to SV was key to their growth. But the original
| research from 20+ years ago on DataCubes visualization was a
| product of academia. It just so happened to coincide with our
| era of "democratizing data science" ;)
|
| Multiscale Visualization Using Data Cubes
|
| https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/pan_zoom/
| altacc wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I know someone who went back to academia
| after getting disillusioned with tech (academia > tech >
| academia). The key difference may be that they live in Europe,
| have no student loans and the pay disparity between a developer
| in bioscience and in tech is not as large as I imagine it is in
| the US. They are paid significantly more than the scientists
| they work alongside but not much less than they were paid in a
| good tech job. For them the bioscience work is much more
| interesting than anything they did in tech (they have a maths-
| based PhD, so were working on quite complex problems but in a
| relatively boring field).
|
| Software development is important to more and more industries
| and the pay disparity caused by insanely large funding and
| little requirement to produce profits means that other sectors
| are being priced out of in-house development, especially niche
| use cases. The ongoing rise of no-code development will be
| increasingly useful across all sectors but will fail to deliver
| a lot of these niche applications.
| busterarm wrote:
| Salaries in Europe are catching up...
| myst1 wrote:
| A lot of the smarter people I know have been recruited into
| Europe. People say "the salaries are so much lower lol",
| but the reality is, you often have employment laws that
| remove terrible occurrences as possibilities that are
| commonplace in America, you have access to healthcare,
| being a home owner is actually possible and if you don't
| want that renting is better overall. European culture is
| usually way less cut throat, and managers typically know
| their stuff, rather then failing upwards to half a million
| dollar salary's where using the word "digital" and being a
| brute is the main requirement.
|
| Salary isn't everything. European engineering is a pretty
| different culture.
|
| The way the us tries to prevent this is by crippling their
| people with student debt.
| busterarm wrote:
| I don't have any student debt pressure, but I'm debating
| trying to do the same. I have a lot of friends in Denmark
| and no strong ties to the US. I'm about to hit my forties
| and it's probably now or never.
| icelancer wrote:
| I did this as well, but started my own company. The key for a
| lot of people making the switch is to make the money in your
| first endeavor - in tech - then transition into a lower-
| paying but more pleasing industry, with the money buffer you
| built up making it possible. I've seen it a few times lately.
| [deleted]
| Archelaos wrote:
| Having worked in academia before the age of 40 (though not in
| computer science), I can agree with this view. To enjoy the
| benefits of status, compensation and, to a certain extent,
| flexibility, one has to reach the level of professor. After
| failing to reach this level at 40, I switched to software
| development, without ever regretting it.
|
| A while ago I saw a position for image recognition in astronomy
| advertised by the university of my town. It sounded all very
| exciting for someone who enjoys figuring out solutions for a
| complex task -- until I looked up the pay grade: Less than half
| of my current hourly rate, without the flexibility I have
| (working from everywhere I want, even pre-Covid). Well, the
| problem seems to be that a competitive salary for a software
| engineer would probably have to be higher than for the
| professor leading the group.
|
| As an aside, I recently had a discussion with a friend in my
| country's military about the cyber defence forces wanting to
| recruit software engineers. There is a similar problem here: if
| they do not use contractors (whom they can pay what they ask
| for), they have difficulty finding an appropriate pay grade,
| since a well-qualified software engineer would have to be paid
| better than a general.
| frozenport wrote:
| What's Nico Stuurman up to these days?
| https://valelab.ucsf.edu/nico_stuurman/
| throwmamatrain wrote:
| Ah, the uManager guys! Great software, sits on top of ImageJ
| (open source image analysis).
|
| Our software was a custom C+Win32 app that was ported from
| CodeWarrior on MacOS 7/8. Windows timers were so crap that I
| ended up using Ryan Geiss' timer from Milkdrop:
| http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/FAQS/timing.html
|
| Yes, that Ryan Geiss, the Winamp one. He now works for Nvidia
| I think.
|
| Our machines were bristling with serial ports, driving high
| speed filter wheels, lasers of every color we could get our
| hands on, special shutters coated with teflon, fast expensive
| cameras, and more! Their work is very much in my old field, I
| was in bioenergetics, specifically mitochondria and their
| dysfunction.
|
| Thanks for the link down memory lane!
| noobermin wrote:
| Since this thread is turning into a yet another complaints
| about academia thread:
|
| One of the serious downsides of working in academia is you are
| basically doing the industry's work for them for less pay and
| they will one day turn around, pat you on the back, then sell
| your work for millions of dollars. It gets worse honestly the
| closer you are to applied fields. There, you already straddle
| the line between what your more "pure" (and less well paid)
| peers think is "science" and actually making things that will
| in fact make people's lives better, so you have less room to be
| idealistic about why you are doing what you're doing, that is,
| whether it is for "moving the needle" or "adding to the corpus
| of humanity's knowledge" or whether you really are just doing
| someone else's work for them they aren't willing to fund given
| the risks. And given that the latter is basically closer to
| what you're doing and your closer to the place where you'll see
| your work enable someone else's riches, it's hard not to want
| to jump ship and just become one of those people on the other
| side but make money hands over fist.
|
| It's an upsetting situation honestly.
| kongolongo wrote:
| I think this is only a half-truth. There certainly are
| examples of academic research being translated into lucrative
| products by industry (there are even prominent examples in
| software/systems engineering) but I think that many times the
| translation of academic research into a useable product is
| also a massive endeavor that deserves recognition in its own
| right.
|
| I see this scenario described in medical research all the
| time with people saying that industry just leeches off of
| academic research and what people leave out conveniently is
| the vast amounts of money and research that goes into
| translating research into a real drug (billions spent on
| clinical trials to meet regulation, millions to billions
| spent on scaling manufacturing and synthesis of the drug to
| industrial volumes, drug delivery like pill design or
| injection methods)
|
| Additionally many industries also do have well-paid research
| positions that "move the needle" on science and basic
| research. While they're more targeted at producing and
| supporting products instead of full liberty to exploring just
| for the sake of knowledge, it's not like there is a complete
| black and white poorly compensated academic research vs
| industry.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Fundamental: the patents produced by taxpayer-financed
| academic research have no business being exclusively
| licensed to some pharmaceutical corporation. As far as the
| cost of clinical trials being borne by those companies,
| well, let's get the FDA involved in the clinical trials.
|
| Then the competition can come in, i.e. whoever can produce
| pure preparations of those drugs at the lowest cost will
| win the most market share. This means investing in top-of-
| the line manufacturing platforms (much of this is now
| outsourced to India, Mexico, etc. for drugs being sold in
| the USA) instead of squatting on the patents, blocking
| competition, and using monopoly status to jack up prices.
|
| Yes, this would greatly reduce the profit margins and
| perhaps the stock prices of Big Pharma outfits, but the
| overall benefits would greatly outweight this. As a
| practical example, look how the best Covid vaccines (mRNA
| types) have been monopolized, leading to low rates of
| vaccination in Africa etc., even though that was technology
| developed with taxpayer funding at public universities.
| jollybean wrote:
| No, if a Uni has developed some patents, and wants to
| 'exclusively license' them to a Pharma, that's probably a
| good application of that patent, they become much less
| worthwhile otherwise.
|
| It's a misunderstanding of the market to suggest that
| somehow 'the FDA will lead the trials'. This is about as
| likely as a manned mission to Venus, it won't happen, and
| it shouldn't happen for good reason (cost vastly
| outweighs the benefits).
|
| It's also a misunderstanding to suggest 'whoever can
| produce pure preparations of those drugs at the lowest
| cost will win the most market share'. The 'cost of
| manufacture' is most cases is not a material or relevant
| issue.
|
| Your example of 'COVID' monopolization is completely
| upside down - companies didn't maximize their profit
| potential there, and may not have even developed such
| vaccines in a normal case, they were giving very special
| prices to places like 'Africa' - and none of this has
| anything to do with 'low uptake' in Africa.
|
| Africa has 'low uptake' for the very same set of reasons
| they don't have electricity, or consistent electricity in
| many places.
| javajosh wrote:
| The next thought should be: why doesn't neo-liberal
| capitalism fix this problem? And: is my characterization of
| the problem correct? Why not start a new firm that better
| compensates researchers (and tool makers) for their valuable
| work? It _seems_ like big tech (especially Google, and
| perhaps Microsoft) comes in from the commercial side and
| invests in R &D at reasonable rates for just this purpose!
| But surely if workers are systematically undercompensated,
| there is room for a disruptive firm to come in and take the
| best talent and _still_ make a profit.
|
| Perhaps the characterization is wrong and the EV (expected
| value) of this work is far lower than you think (this seems
| likely), and/or there are externalities like regulation, or
| the leverage of prestige that traditional orgs (e.g.
| universities and publishers) wield, that warp the profit
| incentive. Or (and this is my cynical view) pure science was
| always best left to the hobbyists. Historically the most
| important discoveries have come only rarely and to those who
| loved doing science in their free time or, more rarely, when
| a talented individual found a patron. Building a science
| factory and hiring science factory workers not only sounds
| distasteful, but it doesn't seem to work very well. (The
| exceptions being those very capital intensive projects like
| the LHC which require a large pool of professional scientists
| and engineers to do the experiment.)
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| >why doesn't neo-liberal capitalism fix this problem?
|
| The whole point of academia is to subsidize research before
| it gets to an application phase. How can a private firm
| compete with academia who benefits from government funding
| and are tax exempt? Trying to pin this problem on
| "capitalism" is just lazy.
| javajosh wrote:
| No, lazy would be straw-manning a stranger's argument for
| no good reason to elicit an emotional reaction. It's a
| style of communication that seeks conflict rather than
| understanding, and there is plenty of it on twitter and
| reddit, but not here.
| hackernewds wrote:
| They expected value theory is very plausible. there are a
| lot of r&D projects that basically produce zero output for
| decades. high risk high reward
| someguydave wrote:
| why should anyone pay when the government is keeping it all
| alive today?
| dgb23 wrote:
| There are plenty of firms that sell software to academia
| and many of them make a ton of money. I bet there are great
| opportunities in that space. I guess the issue is that most
| business educated/oriented people are both too disjoint
| from both engineering and science, so competition is rare.
| dahart wrote:
| > surely if workers are systematically undercompensated,
| there is room for a disruptive firm to come in and take the
| best talent and still make a profit.
|
| Other good replies here, but this part of the comment
| reveals some assumptions that need better definition.
| Having been both, I can comfortably say that academics
| aren't "workers" in the same way that industry programmers
| are "workers". The parent comment is not correct about the
| norm; programming for research projects is not usually sold
| for profit later to industry. It happens occasionally, but
| most academic work stays academic. Sometimes when it does
| happen, it's in the form of a spinoff company that brings
| the original authors of the software, and so they end up
| getting some of the proceeds... when the business survives.
|
| Also the top comment didn't say 'undercompensated' - in
| business this has a clinical meaning that someone is being
| paid lower than market rates. We know that adademics pays
| lower, but we do not know that it's lower than market rates
| _for academics_. It's plenty true in industry alone that
| you can make a lot of money at Facebook or very little
| money at a small indie game dev shop. That doesn't mean the
| indie game devs are undercompensated, it means they're in a
| different market.
|
| Starting firms to compensate researchers better is what
| pharmaceuticals (for example) are. The problem with your
| suggestion is that the need for income can undermine the
| ability to do research that is unbiased, risky,
| controversial, critical, or just free of agenda. If you pay
| researchers in line with what Bay Area programmers get, it
| will put an _enormous_ burden on the PIs to make many
| multiples more money than their peers, and compete with
| them using a small fraction of the number of people of peer
| groups.
| psyc wrote:
| I'd guess that the expected commercial value being low
| would be the norm, and discoveries making millions
| _relatively_ rare, just as this is in every other context.
| However, the second half of your second paragraph is where
| my mind went to first, because what gp says happens does
| happen, albeit at a normal (low) rate. The motivation of
| people working in science is different, as it is in say the
| games business. Game developers have historically been paid
| lower except at a tiny handful of companies. Not 33 cents
| on the dollar, but maybe 50 to 70 (bearing in mind that
| FAANG /unicorn salaries are not the norm either)
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > The next thought should be: why doesn't neo-liberal
| capitalism fix this problem?
|
| _You are the vehicle_ by which neo-liberal capitalism
| fixes the problem. By leaving academia to work for a firm
| directly, you are responding to a price signal sent by the
| industry, relaying that price signal to the academic labs.
|
| You might object, this is slower than most price signals!
| That's _because_ the university environment is somewhat
| insulated from the ordinary pressures of capitalism (and
| thus better able to exploit young research programmers).
| throwmamatrain wrote:
| "If it always worked, it would be business. Let's go to the
| pub." -- Me, consoling a grad student after experiment
| failure #24.
|
| More seriously, if you're in basic science, your skills are
| valuable in transforming the work into a more useful thing
| to be used later. Using your science factory model, you
| have created a reusable widget that other people can use.
| The science factory model does work, you can see its
| results in things like MIAME:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1201-365 Where large
| pooled datasets are used to get insights otherwise
| impossible.
|
| There's not a ton of low hanging fruit in some fields, as
| time has gone on the edges are harder and more expensive to
| see to be at the cutting edge. Ex: you spend $2M on a
| microscope that does a cool thing and two years later the
| new model is all that, a bag of chips, and a soda for the
| low price of $750k. You hope you have a good enough
| relationship with the vendor that they will either mod or
| upgrade your system, or that those two years were enough
| for you to get ahead. It probably wasn't. And you now have
| a not as fast ferrari for more money than the fast ferrari.
|
| There is a massive glut of international students willing
| to work for basically nothing, beholden to your PI by their
| visas. I say this not as xenophobia, but I was the only
| working class American (my parents do not have degrees) in
| the department. All students/postdocs that I worked with
| were from other countries, or if they were American, their
| families were doctors, or a faculty member. More generally,
| the kind of people that might own horses :D.
|
| No firm would take this work on, as the profits are not
| clear, and the time scales for success range from two years
| to never. In this case success is "great job publishing,
| we'll give your lab another 2-3y of funding." After which,
| you better get good at writing books and eating pasta.
| jrumbut wrote:
| I would also say, and I'm surprised this needs to be said
| in a community that is so connected to the Open Source
| and startup cultures, that just because something is
| valuable doesn't mean it's possible to make a business
| out of it.
|
| Imagine research into a technique for getting better
| blood pressure readings from people who are so nervous
| around medical settings that their blood pressure spikes
| (or more basic research into the mechanisms of blood
| pressure and anxiety). This is a valuable thing to
| society (more accurate data informing treatment decisions
| for individuals, screening for physically demanding jobs,
| life insurance, forecasting medical spending for Medicare
| and the like), but it's not worth a lot to anyone in
| particular.
|
| For the field you described originally, complex imaging
| devices, there are only so many users of that research so
| it's conceivable that work could be taken up by a
| corporate R&D department.
|
| There are all kinds of other very useful research topics
| that are very valuable to humanity as a whole but it's
| not clear exactly who should pay for it (I'm not saying
| you aren't aware of this BTW, hopefully I'm adding
| support to your argument). In those cases it makes a lot
| of sense to take a fraction of a cent from everyone and
| pay for it that way, as we currently do.
| throwmamatrain wrote:
| Totally! Most of our best equipment was stolen and modded
| from materials science imaging or manufacturing
| automation. There was a budding industry for automated
| fluorescence imaging, but they were still finding their
| legs.
|
| We had a couple electron microscopes that we modernized
| from film, and the companies we contracted with mostly
| dealt with materials people.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's very difficult to tell what will become valuable in
| the basic research world and what will remain a
| curiousity. A classic example in biotech is the study of
| sex in bacteria - it seemed about as useful as studying
| the sexual reproduction of ferns at the time. Bacteria
| generally replicate themselves clonally, but the
| discovery that they were also exchanging genetic material
| by the use of plasmids (essentially, mating with each
| other) eventually opened the doors to things like cloning
| the human insulan gene, inserting it into a plasmid,
| getting a bacteria to take up the plasmid, and then,
| voila, human insulin could be grown in vats in bulk. That
| was the first real biotech business that I know of, and
| from there it just exploded.
|
| The problem with universities pushing research that
| clearly has some short-term financial reward (due solely
| to patents and exclusive licenses under the 1980s Bayh-
| Dole law) is that they neglect basic research and so
| close the door to the potential of truly fundamental
| discoveries like that. This is generally known as the
| corporatization of the American academic system and it's
| really been a disaster for basic technological advances.
| jrumbut wrote:
| Do you think the decline of large corporate R&D efforts
| is cause or effect here (or is this a false premise)?
|
| I am wondering whether we've seen the reverse of the idea
| I was originally challenging (if research was valuable it
| would be a business), where universities captured a
| profitable business because it was being neglected by the
| business community (and were distracted from basic
| research).
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| >The next thought should be: why doesn't neo-liberal
| capitalism fix this problem?
|
| Neo-liberal capitalism _fixes_ problems?!
| jollybean wrote:
| Less than 1% of 'research' ends up being commercially viable
| in any way.
|
| Almost zero research is commercialized directly, in a manner
| that equates tech to 'product'.
|
| There are usually enormous costs in applying research to
| markets - just because something 'makes a million' doesn't
| mean there were no costs.
|
| As for software:
|
| We probably need cleaner, simpler tools, better SaaS for many
| things.
|
| We just can't afford to have a lot of devs doing research.
|
| Think about the zillions in lost man hours due to Python
| weirdness of various kinds. It's a giant productivity sink.
|
| Also, I hope tooling for many researchers starts to improve.
|
| I think the target should be, in most cases, that researchers
| themselves have the tools available to 'do their work'
| without having to hire devs.
| yiyus wrote:
| This.
|
| I have worked for almost 15 years in academic research, but in
| very close collaboration with the steel industry. The code we
| write can help steel companies to save millions when developing
| new products. This is quite complex software, which combines
| materials science, mechanical engineering and advanced
| mathematical concepts while requiring high performance and
| reliability.
|
| I found a nice position for a tenure track in France, in a top
| research centre. Besides designing and writing software, I
| would have to design and implement experimental plans, teach,
| deal with students and administration, keep an excellent
| publications record, and find funding for future projects.
| Remote work would not be a possibility (but I would work may
| unpaid extra hours at home). And the amount of published papers
| and recommendation letters required just to be considered for
| the job was overwhelming. My salary would be lower than
| $30k/year. They do not even know what is a RSE.
|
| I am searching a remote job in the software industry now.
| siva7 wrote:
| seriously? in what kind of alternative reality does academia
| live to offer 30k?
| ninesnines wrote:
| come to Denmark! you can make about 60k a year as a phd
| student!
| rbanffy wrote:
| But then you need to learn Danish. Brains can only fit
| that much stuff ;-)
| noobermin wrote:
| European countries have lower salaries in general? Although
| their social safety nets are better.
|
| Also, assistant professors (or the equivalent there)
| generally make less but do probably make more once they get
| tenure. I'm assuming they meant the tenure-track position
| itself is ~30K USD, but making tenure usually does mean a
| pay increase.
| evandijk70 wrote:
| In the Netherlands, 30k is the starting salary for a PhD
| student.
|
| 30k for a tenure track position sounds insane to me.
| krageon wrote:
| I have spoken to quite a few that made minimum wage
| (which is not even close to 30k).
| danieldk wrote:
| The situation is a bit weird in The Netherlands. Some PhD
| students are paid employees (AiO), their gross salary is
| ~31000 to 40000 Euro per year (I think this is excluding
| vacation money, but including 13th month).
|
| Then there are PhDs that get a scholarship (bursaal),
| that is only around 24000-25000 gross per year.
|
| Not too long ago, there were only employee PhDs, but some
| universities really love the scholarship system, because
| they have to pay less tax, so it's a lot cheaper for the
| universities.
|
| My wife had a PhD scholarship in NL and it really had
| some large negative effects after finishing her PhD:
|
| - She contributed 4 years less into a pension fund, since
| bursary PhDs do not build up pension outside the state
| pension;
|
| - In her next academic position, they didn't consider her
| four years of PhD work as working experience, while they
| did do that for me as an employee PhD. So, she was set
| back 4 years in salary growth.
|
| - She finished her PhD in August and started a full time
| job after her PhD. Because she had an income that went
| over some threshold, she had to pay the taxes that the
| university dodged by using the scholarship system. She
| worked the rest of the year at a loss (the taxes were
| higher than the income from September-December).
|
| The worst part of it is that many foreign PhD students do
| not realize that there is a two-class system.
| danieldk wrote:
| Update: today's news is that the minister of education
| requires that all students on a PhD scholarship will get
| a regular employment from 2024 onwards:
|
| https://ukrant.nl/minister-zet-definitief-streep-door-
| experi...
| myst1 wrote:
| In the us, a few years ago, my program offered a stipend
| of 22,000 usd per year. Provided I taught a few classes,
| graded homework, tests, etc. While doing research and
| taking my own classes.
|
| That was very lucky, many programs do not offer stipends
| and require people to take out loans.
| [deleted]
| maccard wrote:
| In Ireland PhD stipends are closer to 13-17k. It's not a
| perfect comparison because the PhD stipends are tax free,
| so your comparative salary would be in the 17-20k mark.
| That said, Postdoc research positions are much closer to
| 40k than 30k.
| danieldk wrote:
| That's still pretty miserable. In Germany, an assistent
| professor or postdoc makes 60k Euro after a few years,
| even when they are in the pay scale that only requires a
| master's degree (TVL-13).
| n4r9 wrote:
| A university lecturer in the UK will start at around
| PS30-35k.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| For context, you have 7 weeks holiday, you can't get fired,
| your working hours are quite flexible. In France, medical
| expense, education is free. And outside of Paris and a few
| other big cities, rents are rather affordable. So all
| things considered, it's not a bad deal (which is why they
| do attract good candidates). And a typical SWE position in
| private sector in France would be $50-60K (of course
| there's variance there, but in academia, there are also
| ways to make extra money)
| siva7 wrote:
| that's way to low even for private sector. flexible
| working hours are pretty much the new standard in SWE so
| not anymore even an argument
| myst1 wrote:
| I've seen people get fired from a academia on several
| occasions... When they couldn't fire someone they beat
| them down so regularly and buried them so deep people
| left or had a mental breakdown.
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| I'm aware of several academics that are banking 1M+
| annual providing consulting services.
| blululu wrote:
| Only possible if you are a late career academic with a
| lab and a publication record. They are paying for the
| prestige and the pipeline to new hires more than the
| technical advice (ok sometimes they pay for the technical
| advice but I've never seen that get a good roi). I can
| think of a few instances of professors consulting with
| companies where I worked and they all had grey hair and
| Tenure. The rich get richer, but these examples are a
| variant on 'lottery winners can make good money'.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > But I would work may unpaid extra hours at home
|
| I think that's incorrect. You would work the number of hours
| you wish to work (considering you produce reasonable value,
| but the bar is low). Research engineer (or researcher for
| that matter) in a public French research center is a civil
| servant position. They are difficult to get but you don't get
| fired unless something is blatantly wrong.
|
| Source: I worked 10+ years in such a position. I work now for
| a FAANG and the pressure is considerably higher. Evaluations
| every 6 months, lot of peer pressure (engineers are _on
| average_ better and more ambitious than those in academia and
| you need to keep up - some of them seem to work 24 /7),
| extremely stressful oncalls. Gross salary is 5 times my
| previous salary and has the potential to increase much more.
|
| Of course, this is certainly not representative of all cases,
| but most of the time, there's a price to pay for a higher
| salary. Another thing to think about is ageism: as a research
| engineer in academia, you're all set until retirement. In
| software industry, it's getting hard after 50.
| sbt wrote:
| > You don't have enough letters after your name to matter, and
| you will likely be a pet instead of a peer.
|
| This is an underrated point. This is the case for programmers
| in finance as well, and requires a hefty salary premium to put
| up with.
| kevstev wrote:
| Agreed- you might appreciate a story that happened recently.
| I worked at a finance algo trading startup, right before and
| into the financial crisis. The first CEO/founder gets ousted,
| new guy is an old school "phones and traders" kind of guy,
| and didn't know, or even seem to care about tech at all. It
| was a strange choice, since we were built as a tech first
| company, but seeing as we were having difficulty getting
| traction, I think the hope was by getting the old guard type
| in there, we would have an easier time selling the new
| thing... anyway, I give this a go for a few months but
| eventually leave as I just could not stand his hardly
| contained contempt for technology, you could just see it on
| his face that he longed for the days of dropping F bombs on
| the floor, and then going out for expensive steak dinners at
| night. As I give my resignation, I get screamed at, he is red
| in the face dropping F bombs on me- "You are F---ing us!"
| etc... Long story short, I offered them to counter, with a
| 10x'ing of my equity stake, and even to extend my notice
| period- at my newly offered salary, but they declined all of
| it, though practically begged me to stay on for 3 extra
| months at my current salary. On the week I left, this guy
| tries to get me to sign all kinds of nasty non-disparagement
| agreements, which I had not signed previously, and with no
| additional consideration ($) in exchange, and I just refused,
| and he literally threw the stack of papers at me at one
| point. I guess I took all of this because I had literally
| been there since day 1 and just had a sense of ownership over
| everything- I also didn't think this guy would last very
| long.
|
| Anyway, fast forward about 10 years to a few months ago, I
| get a generic "cold call" type message on LinkedIn from a
| unicorn data tools company, from the same CEO guy- he bounced
| around and somehow landed a sales role there. I ignored the
| first one... he sent a followup, and I was incredulous- did
| he not remember me? Did he not care? It was something along
| the lines of "Hey how are you? I am working with xxxx and
| think you would be interested- can we set up a chat..." and I
| just replied back saying "I am great, haven't been screamed
| at or had anyone throw something at me in ten years..." and
| he still had the balls to right back something like "lol,
| great. Let me know when we can set up a call..." and I wasn't
| really sure how to respond, but after about a week just wrote
| "If your next message isn't a very specific apology for your
| past behavior, do not contact me. I am surprised with your
| past attitude you would even work at a place like xxxx." If
| he was a dick I was going to reach out to their head of sales
| and possibly CEO explaining his past and how I was
| disappointed that a firm with their reputation would even
| hire someone like that. He gave me just a half hearted enough
| non-specific apology to not do that- followed up immediately
| with an offering of buying me a beer (so he can pitch me), so
| I opted not to escalate any further.
|
| I have a few other stories similar to this, where Karma
| really bit those that were hostile and condescending towards
| technology and technologists, but this is the most direct. I
| kept in touch with a few of the old "traders" I used to work
| with, and used to go out for drinks with them from time to
| time, and they would invite a larger group of people, and I
| actually stopped because they were all kind of depressing-
| they all lost their old jobs, a few pivoted into different
| decent roles, but mostly they just got drunk pining for the
| good old days to come back.
|
| While there was a tiny bit of schadenfreude, in the end its
| just sad.
| konschubert wrote:
| Are you talking about the letters P, H and D? As in, if you
| don't have a PhD they don't see you as a peer?
| exdsq wrote:
| I've honestly yet to meet a research software engineer
| without a PhD because of the academic bias you will get in,
| well, academia.
| gvurrdon wrote:
| I work with two of them at the moment. One is planning to
| apply for a PhD studentship soon, but the other does not
| intend to do so.
| pikewood wrote:
| I'm one who started with only a BS, and I'm at a top-20
| public university in the US. It depends on your PIs, but
| I've definitely been appreciated on many of the projects
| I've worked on (e.g., listed with 2nd most ownership
| percentage on invention disclosures, which also won a
| campus-wide yearly award).
|
| Admittedly, my path was convoluted; I started as a
| engineer to help with non-research software at a large
| lab, and got pulled on to projects via reputation. But I
| was replacing a Master's student who was essentially at
| the same academic level as me anyway. It does pay less,
| but I made the tradeoff for the quality of projects,
| which was worth more to me at this point in my career.
| It's still much more than I need, just not at industry
| levels.
| zahllos wrote:
| Ok well I can fix that. Hi, I'm a research software
| engineer and I don't have a PhD.
|
| I'm in Europe. My salary is definitely better than the
| PhD students' salaries, and I have a proper adult pension
| as that's a legal requirement here. My salary is
| approximately equal to what a graduate might earn 1-2
| years after graduating in the local market, so doesn't
| match my actual experience, but I accepted the post for
| pandemic-induced reasons. Certainly the salary does not,
| nor will ever, compare to levels.fyi/FAANG type jobs or a
| large corp in country.
|
| However it is true that my position officially is very
| much a curiosity. We don't have a defined RSE type role,
| so the slot I fit in is "staying on to help out on
| project after graduating". My job is a fixed term
| contract that can only be renewed a certain number of
| times and I'm approaching that limit soon. There isn't
| any viable track to joining the ranks of researchers - I
| would have to do a masters first, and this ironically
| would require doing an internship, in spite of the fact I
| have more actual industry (non-university) experience
| than the entire lab combined.
|
| I'm also not sure if my lab head bent the rules or not on
| hiring me - it might be the case that I am _supposed_ to
| have a PhD or at least a masters.
|
| I would agree with top level post in most points. It is
| interesting work, but I don't "belong" anywhere in "the
| system". This _might_ change in 10-20 years. Artefact
| evaluation is very much becoming a thing in systems
| research, because being able to reproduce other people 's
| work is quite important, and very occasionally you will
| stumble upon papers whose claims are, ah, more expansive
| than the associated github project can fulfil. As more
| research relies on software that graduate students are
| simply ill-equipped to write (by virtue of having no
| experience in anything and by being taught by professors
| most of whom no experience writing production code) the
| role of an RSE might become more important in time, but
| like anything it'll be a slow change.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > My salary is approximately equal to what a graduate
| might earn 1-2 years after graduating in the local market
|
| When talking about the "local market" in Europe one needs
| to take into account the large number of "dark matter
| devs" that are working remotely for SV companies, at SV
| salaries. They simply won't ever show up for interviews
| at local companies.
| zahllos wrote:
| In this case then I mean local local market, not devs
| working remotely for SV. I am aware. One of my friends
| does this and earns 2x what I do, in cash.
| ohlookabird wrote:
| For many years I worked in a high profile research
| institute (neuroscience) as an RSE without a PhD. Still
| don't have one, and that's okay (for the path I'm on).
| Quite a few of the other RSEs in the institute don't have
| one either. In total I'd say maybe 50% didn't have a PhD.
| xen0 wrote:
| Depending on the definition of RSE, I may or may not have
| been one. The company I worked for was a Synchrotron
| Light Source; I worked on software for data collection on
| X-Ray beamlines. I would say that only about half of
| those in the same role as me had a PhD.
|
| Moving away from data collection to analysis, the
| fraction of PhDs went up, but only reached 1.0 when
| considering the sub-group specialising in structural
| biology.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I found a role like this. I love it, with the caveat that
| doing research, software dev, and some lead-type stuff is
| a lot of work. Though my hours are capped at 40, I
| probably am thinking about it on some level at least
| fifty hours.
|
| Pay is quite good, though, so I can't complain.
| lucideer wrote:
| While informal culture and individuals' self-importance do
| play a role, it's also down to strict old-fashioned salary
| scales that many universities have in place (even if your
| day-to-day colleagues see you as a peer, the administrative
| systems defining your salary range can't/won't). Salaries
| are often strictly attached to letters behind your name, at
| a high level, and largely immovable by individual research
| departments.
|
| And secondly, while your PHD peers may earn more than you,
| they also often earn much less than software industry
| averages.
| blululu wrote:
| I don't think this is true in the slightest. At UC,
| research assistants typically make more than Grad
| Students or post-docs (of course the overhead and
| mentorship are also different and allegedly there is some
| possibility for greater career advancement). The snobbery
| is just plain snobbery. In industry there are plenty of
| people who make substantially more than me and I have
| never once felt the levels of condescension that I got
| from mediocre academics. There are maybe rationalizations
| related to scarcity and all that but jerk behavior is
| still jerk behavior.
| lucideer wrote:
| The intent of my comment wasn't to make out snobbery
| doesn't exist (or isn't rampant - it is & I've
| experienced plenty of snobbery from academics myself).
| Just that there are additional factors.
|
| > _At UC, research assistants typically make more than
| Grad Students or post-docs_
|
| That's cool but I didn't say every university; I don't
| think one counterexample makes my comment "[not] true in
| the slightest".
| myst1 wrote:
| Even if you have a PhD it sucks. Everyone without a PhD is
| trying to one up you, and everyone with one has invented
| ten other arbitrary things that ensure you are human trash
| on arrival.
|
| Also, imagine all the people who failed out of masters or
| PhD programs who end up in management and are resentful.
| It's a surprisingly common thing.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I'm surprised they even let you in without one.
|
| Everyone "scientific programmers" potion I've seen wants
| you to have a PhD and be a domain expert.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| It certainly echoes my experience having just left a
| professional dev job in academia after an 11 year stretch.
| Anybody without academic credentials relevant to the subject
| matter is _" the help"_ no matter how much you contribute,
| and it's flat-out demoralizing.
|
| I worked on a tech-heavy project large enough to get an NYT
| feature article covering its launch. For it, I collaborated
| heavily on the service design and logistics, and
| singlehandedly designed, built, administered, documented,
| supported, and provided training for the technical
| infrastructure and more than a dozen related interfaces and
| tools. In lines of code, it probably landed somewhere in the
| low 5 figures, but that was certainly way more than it needed
| to be. It was hackish but durable and performant. It was an
| exercise in pure generalism-- no individual accomplishment
| was close to technically innovative enough to warrant a novel
| white paper, but I was invited to speak at a few related
| conferences about it.
|
| But the professor overseeing the project didn't even mention
| me or my role in his launch party speech for the folks _in
| our building,_ let alone anywhere that would have provided
| career visibility. He thanked and spoke about the
| contributions of every other major contributor-- even the
| temp worker who ran the machines (he wouldn 't want to appear
| classist after all)-- but I got a hand shake and quiet thank
| you after his speech for my 5 year effort. I was at every
| related manager's meeting and largely seen as one of three
| "go-to" people for the project in general, not just tech
| stuff.
|
| This sort of gatekeeping is a part of academic culture I just
| don't get. At least in business there's some predictability
| to people stepping on each other to get to the top, but
| what's the purpose of this?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Anybody without academic credentials relevant to the
| subject matter is "the help" no matter how much you
| contribute, and it's flat-out demoralizing.
|
| That's my number one advice regarding academia: unless
| there's a path toward a valuable visa, or it's paid work
| while getting a valuable degree (read, something that will
| have the prestige to open doors) or your co-author at a
| good university you're much better building something for
| yourself somewhere else.
|
| > no individual accomplishment was close to technically
| innovative enough to warrant a novel white paper [...] But
| the professor overseeing the project didn't even mention me
| or my role in his launch party speech for the folks in our
| building, let alone anywhere that would have provided
| career visibility. He thanked and spoke about the
| contributions of every other major contributor
|
| That's because papers are the metric by which visibility is
| measured. Pretty much the only way to move forward is
| getting your name as author on the main papers.
| sampo wrote:
| > no individual accomplishment was close to technically
| innovative enough to warrant a novel white paper
|
| There are so many academic journals, from scammy, to bad
| (yet honest), to average, to good, to the top. You can
| publish almost anything, if you select an appropriate, less
| prestigious journal.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Yeah-- wouldn't have helped in this situation. I was a
| professional and (deliberately) not in an academic career
| path, and at this very prestige-conscious institution,
| publishing in a scuzzy journal probably would have made
| me look worse.
| fjeifisjf wrote:
| the_only_law wrote:
| Yeah but am I going to get the job if all I have is
| garbage published in no name journals?
| psyc wrote:
| _This sort of gatekeeping is a part of academic culture I
| just don 't get_
|
| This is just a hypothesis, but I'd predict a high
| correlation between becoming an academia lifer, and having
| certain preexisting personality disorders, stemming from
| having never derived a sense of self worth from anything
| other than academic achievement since they learned to
| speak. Or maybe I'm just speaking for myself :)
|
| Similar to the top tier of tech companies being destructive
| and amoral in their own ways, not only because they're
| corporations, but also because programmers see technical
| challenges waiting to be solved like a moth sees a porch
| light, but see ethical problems dimly. (still probably
| speaking for myself...)
| linuxftw wrote:
| What you did doesn't matter, and they gave you the right
| amount of recognition. There are 1000's of imported
| indentured servants that will happily do your job the
| moment you leave. Of course, we don't call them indentured
| servants any more, we use terms like 'academic visa' or
| such.
|
| I'm sure they also didn't think the electricity company for
| keeping the lights on, or Microsoft for creating Windows to
| write their speeches, or the guy that emptied the waste
| baskets in the office so the PHD guy didn't have to.
|
| Don't carry water for someone else. Enrich yourself. That's
| all anyone else is doing, all the 'research' is for
| personal enrichment and prestige. Don't prop up the broken
| academic industry with less than market wages, let them
| fail.
| [deleted]
| jxramos wrote:
| totally this. I had a boss once who took me aside in her office
| to probe interests and direction. Somewhere she quipped about
| work in academia being paid peanuts. It was a pretty shocking
| statement and attitude to hear it so bluntly, especially being
| so close in time to my own graduation and years at the
| university and admiration for that world. But in all honesty I
| never heard it challenged much.
|
| Later as I started to hear more about how economies function
| and how revenues really build up and stem from consumers in
| volume I came to realize that things that ultimately benefit a
| lot of people generate a lot of money. I saw an intermediary of
| this working at Apple and seeing how much funds they had to
| spend vs biomedical companies that were more conservative with
| their funds. Consumer electronics and consumer products in
| general have a lot of customers, benefit a lot of people, and
| ultimately earn a lot of money.
|
| Academia is much more limited in its scope and immediate
| benefit. That delay in benefit shapes the money involved in all
| sorts of surprising ways that aren't immediately apparent while
| still under the wings of the academic world and the
| "currencies" they operate with be it notoriety, prizes, grants,
| etc etc. Ultimately the results and products of academia are
| suspect and risky since they're often in the prototype unvetted
| phase of birthing into existence. Those thoughts Elon Musk
| shares while touring Starbase about design vs manufacturing in
| the gauntlet of tests against reality where the two forms get
| vetted side by side come to mind here. His statement of "design
| is overrated" probably has a close analogue in academia.
| Products of the mind are essentially untested and may not stand
| up to reality along whatever dimensions one needs to evaluate
| them against, or as is probably more often the case simple
| don't scale to the degree needed to impact a large number of
| people in a short time frame to translate to paying customers.
| alimov wrote:
| Thank you for your comment, it was a joy to read and get a
| peek.
| leemailll wrote:
| I heard nih might be a decent place for possible permanent
| position other than PI in bio fields
| zozbot234 wrote:
| As usual, xkcd is relevant: https://xkcd.com/664/
| ManBlanket wrote:
| I dropped graduate research into adversarial algorithms and
| generative adversarial networks when I realized instead of
| being paid beans to do something genuinely interesting I could
| get paid 6 figures to make business software and do whatever I
| want with my free time. Like so many other potential promising
| academic software engineers, I had a family to raise and a life
| to live. No kidding science needs more research software
| engineers, but that isn't going to change until science can pay
| software engineers at least a basic minimal income. When that
| changes I'll considering picking up where I left off.
| srg0 wrote:
| The principal incentive of science is publish or perish. Novelty
| trumps replication of the previous results (see replication
| crisis). Use of the citation metrics to evaluate performance in
| science is similar to relying on likes in the social media to
| measure importance. The number of citations matter more than the
| effort (cost) of producing the result. This environment favors
| those who can deliver something that's good enough, and then move
| on (and publish often).
|
| Software engineering is a continuous effort. Maintenance often
| requires more time and resources than the original development.
| It's more like curating a library or a database. Their product is
| perceived to stay the same. Incremental improvements do not
| advance the career of the maintainer at all. Researchers who sink
| their time into software development mostly hurt their academic
| careers. Even if they publish a paper about ResearchTool 1.0.0,
| they won't be able to publish another one about ResearchTool
| 1.0.1 and another one about ResearchTool 1.0.2. Meanwhile, their
| peers will probably publish "A", "B", and "C".
|
| Science needs a career path which does not depend on the number
| of publications.
| justahuman74 wrote:
| Pay money.
| jacek wrote:
| I used to work as a research software engineer in life sciences
| and I absolutely loved it. Jobs at universities allowed me to
| learn and experiment. However, universities cannot compete with
| industry when it comes to salaries.
|
| For example, in Germany where I now live, all public universities
| (and almost all prestigious schools that do high-profile research
| are public) have strict salary rules. You can find tables (like
| this one [1]), according to which your pay is determined. It
| depends on the job, land (state), degree, and years worked. While
| this kind of money allows comfortable life (or at least did
| before the inflation hit hard), industry offers at least 30% more
| (based on my perception).
|
| [1] https://www.jobs-beim-staat.de/tarif/tv-l_e13
| [deleted]
| Mandatum wrote:
| Science can pay me more.
| dukoid wrote:
| I wish there was a platform connecting research in need for some
| coding with volunteers. It probably wouldn't work for large scale
| projects, but for smaller problems it might be worth a shot,
| perhaps utilizing the stackoverflow platform?
| atemerev wrote:
| I am a research software engineer, and I worked short-term
| contracts only, and my last contract was not prolonged due to
| budget cuts (with a laughable salary about four times less
| compared to industry -- thankfully, I wasn't there for money).
| The administrative personnel, on the other hand, were all working
| on permanent contracts.
|
| I guess science does not need more research software engineers
| after all!
| [deleted]
| prpl wrote:
| I'd been active-ish in US-RSE and worked at a national lab for
| 10+ years. I left about a half year ago for a position at a FANG-
| ish company.
|
| My pay was almost doubled (after counting bonus) and with RSUs
| it's double+.
|
| I could have squeezed out another $XXk maybe when I left the
| national lab system, should I had stayed.
|
| The biggest reasons I left were as follows:
|
| 1. Too much legacy responsibility. Legacy responsibility is
| usually underfunded or unfunded but "important". It's a lot of
| work to keep the lights on. NASA usually handles this with
| contractors which are usually paid even less than a National Lab
| person.
|
| 2. Bifurcation at the lab towards very large projects or very
| small projects. Not a lot of stuff in the $250MM to $750MM which
| is large enough to have an effective team and go full time, but
| small enough to not be anonymous/matrixed out to subprojects. The
| high end is a very funny place
|
| 3. Related to (2) is not enough new blood or turnover. This may
| be a good thing but you can be hired as a junior engineer and end
| up as a senior engineer without anybody below you for years.
| Getting an intern is a dark art if your not a staff scientist
|
| 4. Institutional BS. Looking at you, security drones with
| professional certificates running qualys/nessus scans. and you
| too, data center people afraid of the cloud.
|
| Some to zero agility in terms of compute - everything is a nail
| and slurm is your hammer
|
| The university-based RSEs complain a lot about not being
| respected/publishing. I never really had that issue much
| specifically, but that may be because there's a stronger
| understanding of value in the national lab system. On the other
| hand, poor leadership/project management means you may still be
| at the whim of an idiot, servicing their desire for some crappy
| web app project. In those cases, it's best to ignore.
|
| I will probably go back after some time when I'm throughly
| annoyed by BigCorp. In the mean time, it's fine on the other side
| and at least I don't have to patch Jenkins every two weeks.
| [deleted]
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| I think this doesn't frame the problem correctly. It promotes a
| separation between software engineers and real scientists which
| helps nobody. Anyone building software for scientific purposes
| really should understand the science behind it. Also, since
| better software allows better scientific outcomes, scientists
| need to understand software engineering. Both should be
| considered scientists and be on an equal footing.
| mr_gibbins wrote:
| The pay gap is real, and a huge reason why perfectly good
| software folk (and scientists, data specialists, etc.) move out
| of academia and into industry.
|
| I have an industry job with good pay with a side of academic work
| stemming from my PhD. My industry income is literally more than
| 2x the salary of my academic PI, who holds a senior academic
| post. My pay, which is probably around the median of most HN
| readers, is slightly more than the top peg of the academic pay
| scale in my area - i.e. University senior leadership team. So I
| do the academic work because I love doing the academic work. I
| cannot afford to take a full-time academic job, although it's
| been offered.
|
| I am baffled as to why academic institutions aren't failing to
| recruit. If they were businesses offering half the going rate,
| they'd get third-rate engineers, if they had any applications at
| all. Instead, there seems to be a long queue for academic tenure
| - and even for non-tenured positions. The only competitive
| advantage I can see is the sense of academic 'freedom' that these
| positions confer.
|
| But - it's not freedom. My academic colleagues spend hours each
| week chasing funding, filling in grant requests, attending
| meetings. Their teaching load is allocated to them without
| choice. They're in the office 9-5 same as everyone else. Academic
| freedom is anything but.
|
| I am lucky that for the research I do, mostly behind a laptop, my
| industry pay lets me afford the things I need to do it - cloud
| services, international travel, software licenses, article
| processing fees. I can 'do science' the way I want to without
| begging anyone for cash or going to grants committees. And I'm
| hoping this brand of 'citizen science' becomes the norm, because
| University-led research is going to get harder and harder the
| more the gap between industry and academic pay widens.
| cozzyd wrote:
| > I am baffled as to why academic institutions aren't failing
| to recruit
|
| Because academics (hi!) aren't in it for the money. If you
| value making lots of money, or having work-life balance, then
| academia isn't for you (nor is social work, teaching, nursing,
| fine art, etc.). But this probably makes it hard to hire RSEs
| who aren't academics masquerading as software engineers...
| mr_gibbins wrote:
| I agree, but there has to be a balance between doing it for
| love and getting a living wage. One of my colleagues, an
| Associate Professor, works in Halfords (shop/garage chain in
| the UK) on the weekends. That isn't right. And many of these
| folk are incredibly intelligent. They are Ricks amongst
| Mortys. They don't deserve to be paid not-quite-enough to
| afford a house and kids.
| milliams wrote:
| I think it's also worth clarifying that there are more than one
| style of RSE. The name came about to describe those
| researchers/postdocs working in research groups whose
| contribution was more to the software than to the writing of
| research papers. For them, the incentive structure wasn't there
| as they were being measured on papers written, not "research
| improved". By giving them the name RSE, it recognises that they
| are playing a different role in the group and perhaps need
| different metrics. At this time, they are still in research
| groups, experts in their field, having likely done a PhD in the
| particular domain. These are still RSEs and there are lots of
| them around (probably more than there are in central groups).
|
| The recent trend is for universities to provide central RSE
| groups (either by core-funding or being costed onto grants in
| parts) which operate more like consultants. This allows a route
| in for people who do not have a PhD or a background in a
| particular field, and can support many smaller projects across
| the university.
|
| For example at Bristol, we have a combination. We have a lose
| federation of "embedded" RSEs and some "RSE group" RSEs (funded
| through various grants) who work together to learn from each
| other, teach around the uni and provide a support network. This
| group was able to be formed due to a fellowship from the
| government back in 2015 (the same fellowship that allowed Paul to
| start his group at Sheffield).
|
| It's important to remember that anyone who is doing "research
| software engineering" is an RSE, even if it's not their job
| title.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| There is (slowly) becoming a concept of a "tour of duty" from
| industry into working in dot-gov (like UK digital service).
|
| Is there room for something similar in academia - to bolster the
| profile of the RSE idea, to get some support funding etc?
| Tade0 wrote:
| I guess I fit this category, because I'm working on a project
| that's based off a scientific paper and is basically a Matlab
| script turned webapp so that all those calculations don't have to
| be done locally.
|
| The pay is indeed around 60-70% of what the industry offers, but
| I would have the same rate if was making a CRUD app[0] for the
| same large company, so it's more about the employer than the type
| of work.
|
| [0] which is something I did in the past - a webapp generating
| documents ensuring regulatory compliance. This organisation likes
| to make webapps.
| PainfullyNormal wrote:
| Where do you find these jobs? And are they only available at
| Universities? I'd be happy to take the pay cut to work on
| something that contributes more to society than getting people to
| click on ads, but not at a college or university.
| mattsouth wrote:
| in the uk,
| https://www.jobs.ac.uk/search/?keywords=RSE&location= gets you
| five hits today and I expect you would find more similar posts
| that werent currently branded research software engineer if you
| looked - the term is still quite new for many academic depts.
| One thing you'll need is patience if you want one of these
| positions - I remember being offerred an academic post three
| months after interviewing for the position and when I queried
| how on earth it could have taken so long to offer the post I
| was met with incredulity that there was an issue at all.
| milliams wrote:
| We (the Society of Research Software Engineering) maintain a
| jobs board at https://society-rse.org/careers/vacancies/. Or if
| you are in the US, they have their own (https://us-
| rse.org/jobs/)
| PainfullyNormal wrote:
| ergl wrote:
| You might be able to find research institutes or national labs
| (I'm a research engineer at one of these). If you're in Europe,
| something like the Max Planck Institute might fit the bill.
|
| Aside, can I ask why you don't want to work at a college or
| university?
| PainfullyNormal wrote:
| [deleted]
| myst1 wrote:
| They should probably pay them the going wage for software
| engineers too. I used to work in science, the salary's are often
| half of what entry level swe positions are, and require an
| PhDs/post docs...
|
| People wonder why r&d in the us is in a slump... Well it's mostly
| because choosing a natural science for a profession is punishment
| compared to software.
| skohan wrote:
| I would actually love to contribute to scientific research. I
| work in industry, which is lucrative and impactful but not that
| satisfying, and I work on pet projects which are satisfying but
| not that impactful. I would happily contribute some of my time to
| scientific projects which are legitimately impactful and also
| challenging.
| haihaibye wrote:
| What areas of science are you interested in, and what
| languages/skillsets do you have?
|
| Maybe I can steer you towards some Github repos
| dbcooper wrote:
| Science needs more "technicians" of all types, and less PhD
| students. Good luck making that transformation though.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Could you elaborate on what that would look like?
| l33t2328 wrote:
| I think they're describing professional grad students.
| raister wrote:
| > Less PhD students
|
| PhD students are the _backbone_ of any research project. They
| interact with postdocs and with undergrads in the research
| ecossystem. If anything, they will be required _more_ in the
| years to come, not _less_.
| dguest wrote:
| It depends on the amount of technical debt in the project.
|
| When there's no technical debt, sure, grad students are the
| backbone. They can happily go about their projects and
| supervise undergrads, while the postdocs supervise them and
| apply for jobs.
|
| In a place where there's a lot of technical debt, a postdoc
| is going to be far more productive than a grad student. In
| some experiments many grad students spend years floundering
| around before they learn enough to cut through the cruft and
| do real research. It's pretty silly to fire all the postdocs
| just when they've managed to understand everything and
| replace them with new grad students.
|
| The tricky thing is keeping enough of the technical staff
| around, and coming up with a system where they are rewarded
| for eliminating debt, rather than penalized for making their
| own hard-earned skills obsolete.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| SOX for the head of research. There are minimal consequences
| for producing poor quality software that creates erroneous
| results and often quite a few incentives for producing
| inaccurate results that can be blamed on a non-human entity
| (the software). Even SOX with an escape clause for "good faith
| effort" would be a game changer since what goes on now would
| never be considered a good faith effort by any court. SOX
| hasn't been anywhere near as successful at modifying behavior
| as it should have been but it still has caused a good bit of
| change and those at the top setting priorities and incentives
| for those below them to align with now know there's a
| possibility of some hefty consequences for reckless or
| negligent behavior.
| msolo wrote:
| I'm a Research Software Engineer with a PhD working in
| Harvard/MIT area for > 5 years. I skipped doing a postdoc and
| have been part several high-profile academic projects in
| genomics. Overall I've loved the experience and can be a great
| move for certain people.
|
| A major pain point in RSE is building and sustaining larger
| software teams around a a single, focused long-term project with
| ~6-8 RSEs working together. Even the most well-funded and
| successful academic labs have a limit to what how much RSE effort
| they can support.
|
| We need new funding models where engineering-focused leaders can
| muster sufficient resources (autonomously) to build great
| software teams that maintain high quality software in the long
| run. Focused Research Organizations (FROs) seem like an
| interesting new idea
| (https://www.dayoneproject.org/ideas/focused-research-
| organiz...).
| Nursie wrote:
| The other side of "We need software engineers in research" is
| surely the botched covid model from Imperial College way back at
| the beginning of the pandemic. The group that produced it had the
| audacity to complain that the software industry didn't make C++
| foolproof enough, and it was our fault that the modelling was
| wrong.
|
| This shows the attitude that some folks in these places have -
| what you do is easy, and rather than your industry being
| exceptional as a profession that makes its tools open and shares
| knowledge openly, you are at fault for releasing things which I
| can get wrong.
|
| "Scientists" in this view are smart people, and anything you
| lesser mortals do should be obvious to them immediately, or it
| must be your fault. Training and experience be damned.
|
| I'd hate to work anywhere where that attitude was prevalent, or
| even really existed at all. And yes I realise that non-software
| folks often hate to work with us because of the exact same thing!
| andi999 wrote:
| Any reference for that incident, i havent heard of it and am
| curious.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Good post on the subject.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30146245
| Nursie wrote:
| Here's the open letter criticising our entire profession for
| producing something as terrible as C++ and allowing
| scientists to get into trouble with it -
|
| http://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2020/05/18/an-open-letter-
| to-s...
|
| There are links back to other parts of the story in the text
| there. Effectively, they built a model that predicted some
| real worst-case stuff, and used that as the basis for advice
| they sent out to try and affect government policy in a bunch
| of places. When the code was finally released and examined,
| it was in a bad state - 15k lines in one source file, race
| conditions, single name globals reused all over the place.
| The results were trash. Then the blame started to fly.
| [deleted]
| haihaibye wrote:
| I skimmed that code at the start of the pandemic and it was
| pretty tragic, eg how accurate could deaths be when there were
| no nursing homes in their models?
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Having worked in both, software is much easier than producing
| quality scientific discoveries.
| Nursie wrote:
| OK great, but being good at one doesn't mean you're
| automatically good at the other, or that it's some 'lesser'
| field's fault when you screw it up.
|
| In this case, due apparently to arrogance, neither was
| produced.
| physicsguy wrote:
| So, I was an RSE? Know why I left?
|
| Money. It's all very well being an RSE but there are two ways of
| being funded (at least here in the UK). One is centrally funded
| by the University - universally this means being shoved into the
| IT hierarchy which is not a good fit. The other is on an ongoing
| basis by doing 1-2 year contracts. So no job security.
|
| The salaries for both of these are very poor. On leaving I took a
| 35% pay rise and do basically the same work but in industry. The
| only difference is that instead of working for engineers in
| academia, I do work for engineers in companies. Since I jumped, I
| negotiated another 20% pay rise. If I'd stayed, I'd have got a 3%
| pay rise. That's not including the fact I get bonuses, private
| health insurance, don't have to pay to park at my own office...
|
| The issue is that the skill set demanded to be an RSE is highly
| desirable in industry - able to write code well, often
| mathematical, familiarity with much of devops type work.
|
| On top of that, researchers don't truly value your contributions.
| They don't want to put you on papers that couldn't have happened
| without your work. On top of that, they're hugely demanding about
| timescales that are unrealistic. I got put onto one project which
| had contractual commitments to deliver to a major governmental
| agency to run a live service, and the guy running the project
| handed me a 5000 line Python 2.7 script that wouldn't even run
| and basically said "get it working". He couldn't even supply the
| input files needed to run it for 2 months after that, just
| ignored emails. I quit before it got any further.
|
| Edit: forgot to add, my boss was a grade higher than me on the
| national academic salaries scale. He had technical responsibility
| and also had to line manage 10 people. Even if I could have
| gotten promoted (impossible - no budget), I didn't want the line
| management responsibility. I earn more than the top of that
| salary band now, and line manage nobody.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Then they'll have to pay market rates. But that in turn might
| cause the scientific staff to revolt.
| dontbenebby wrote:
| No, they need to be willing to give a fair wage and benefits.
|
| I looked into scientific programming, and everyone I offered to
| work for if given an actual _position_ , not an assigned seat and
| the perpetual threat of firing if a string of soft money grants
| ran out, and I got zero takers.
|
| The science field is full of performative narcissists who think
| if they're trying to "cure cancer" or whatever, the lessons from
| psychology, behavioral economics etc simply do not apply to them.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| Majority of frontend developers don't even appreciate a simple
| aspect of science; browser performance get worse as javascript
| bundle size increases. I think we also need software engineers to
| appreciate more on science.
| dwrodri wrote:
| Computer Engineering PhD here. I'm seriously considering
| transitioning out of my program because I've reached a point
| where I'm just writing tons of code on a graduate student stipend
| and quite frankly, it seems doors are opening to me which I had
| previously thought would only be open with the PhD.
|
| I feel like my experience would be very different if I had one
| full-time research engineer who was paid a respectable sum to
| just... help me write code. I like working with undergraduate
| students, but I can't do expect them to commit to the task like I
| would, or a full-time employee. They just don't have the time.
|
| I'm doing my work extending / improving open-source CPU
| simulators and it's just such a huge amount of code. I feel like
| my work would be so much more useful to others if I just had
| another pair of hands to work on docs, do ops work, go back and
| forth on decisions. My advisor doesn't have the time for such
| things.
|
| - - -
|
| On the topic of academic pay: as a PhD student in Boston, I get
| paid $2000 a month pre-tax. Studios and 1BR apartments renting
| for under $1500/mo in a 30-minute commute radius of my campus are
| basically non-existent, so roommates and/or long commutes are a
| must. I'm realizing now why so few US citizens participate in
| graduate CS/CE programs: if you aren't looking for a path to
| citizenship, it just doesn't seem like a great way to spend your
| mid-to-late 20s.
| hackernewds wrote:
| this inadvertent details why the immigration path to
| citizenship is almost modern day labor exploitation. don't get
| me started on how the labor certification process for the green
| card furthers that in a timeline that is decades
| iamcurious wrote:
| Thank you, this is great information
| mr90210 wrote:
| Software Engineers need to be paid.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| The first thing I did for my PhD in experimental quantum
| computing was to rewrite the lab control equipment in Python. It
| was written in LabView and while it worked well it was an
| absolute mess of (literally) tangled spaghetti code. I designed
| and implemented one of the first MVC frameworks for quantum
| computing in Python. It had an interactive IDE where you could
| execute scripts and store snippets (e.g. for qubit calibration),
| an instrument manager that allowed initializing and managing all
| lab equipment (locally and over the network), a data manager that
| allowed capturing and exploring measurement data in real-time and
| instrument frontpanels that allowed interacting with instruments
| (e.g. microwave sources or waveform generators).
|
| Initially my supervisors were very skeptical and thought I'd
| waste my time, as they did not see any value in software
| development. Having a programmable and well organized software
| framework was absolutely instrumental for my work though, and I
| think I couldn't have succeeded at my experiments (demonstrating
| quantum speed-up for a simple quantum algorithm) without it.
| Today the software is still in use in several labs and as far as
| I know they also hired a research software engineer to keep
| developing it.
| nurbl wrote:
| This sounds like a good outcome. From my experience, the usual
| reason small labs setups use things like LabVIEW is that they
| are usually built by one PhD student without experience and
| this is the only way they can get something working in a
| reasonable time. But then the student moves on and the result
| is something that may work, but nobody can build upon.
|
| Still, the situation you describe is unstable because as soon
| as the budget starts to look uncertain that engineer is likely
| the first to go. I really wish institutions would take this
| problem seriously and set up e.g. a department wide development
| group, which could help build and maintain stuff like that and
| ensure continuity. Unfortunately this seems to be against the
| current trend of cutting costs. For example, at the university
| I used to be, they cut the small common electronics shop, which
| was a great resource since the guys there knew all about who
| had what equipment, kept spare parts from broken stuff, etc.
| But in the budget it looked like pure cost I suppose. It's hard
| to measure the value of common resources and nobody wants to
| pay.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| I think the software spread to multiple labs and was even
| used in a commercial startup, so I think it will live on.
| Also, Python skills seem to be increasingly taught at
| universities, so many PhDs have had some exposure to the
| language already.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| > What do you envision for the profession over the next 10 years?
|
| > I want to see RSEs as equals in the academic environment.
| Software runs through the entire research process, but professors
| tend to get most of the recognition and prestige. Pieces of
| software can have just as much impact as certain research papers,
| some of them much more so. If RSEs can get the recognition and
| rewards that they deserve, then the career path will be that much
| more visible and attractive.
|
| As a former RSE I think this is unrealistic. Academia just isn't
| structured to value non-professors (it's far from just RSEs that
| are undervalued.) For me it wasn't so much the money but the
| refusal to sponsor permanent residence. When you see your amazing
| colleagues leave due to dumb departmental policies you realize
| you need to plan your own exit. I miss working in a team with a
| mix of scientists and engineers but I don't miss working for a
| university.
| ajdegol wrote:
| The issue with money is down to the university overheads.
|
| An RSE is paid like a standard researcher (with none of the
| benefits, recognition etc as detailed in other comments), which
| means that the university will take, minimum 50% of the grant
| money for that person.
|
| This is for building work, maintenance, general staff, etc etc.
| But I need a laptop, and I work from home, most of the time the
| IT staff just get in my way and slow my computer down with the
| crap they install.
|
| If the universities didn't take that cut, we could easily pay the
| RSEs more. There's no job security, very little recognition, but
| _every single subject_ requires good code these days.
|
| The real issue here is that without decent coders our science
| will fall behind. Any idiot can write bad code, and smart people
| can write exceptionally bad code, we've all been there, not
| writing simple readable code because it made us feel clever, till
| we had to read it a year later. Academics are smart people who
| believe they can teach themselves to code, and they can, but it's
| generally not good software.
|
| There are also the ancillary benefits of just having someone
| around who can do things like rename your hundreds of files by
| writing a script in 5 minutes rather than you taking two days to
| do it (this actually happened).
|
| For the sake of western science this should be addressed.
| somishere wrote:
| Interesting topic. I recently finished a role that was
| essentially 50% RSE, but working at a university-adjacent non-
| profit. I found the academic work highly interesting+ enjoyable,
| but then most of the tools / applications I built were built
| based on personal experience / perceived gaps and then adopted,
| rather than at the request of a researcher. For the most part I
| found the tech resources available to researchers ad hoc at best,
| but generally non-existent or otherwise out of reach.
| cshenton wrote:
| Would love to work at a University as a Research Engineer. Would
| not love to do it for less than I made as an undergrad out of
| college. Universities can avoid not paying market, but they pay
| more like 40-50% of market.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| You need to be very good, knowledgeable, always willing to learn
| and research, hard working and you make 50% of what a guy who did
| a 3 months bootcamp makes for working at a Rails crud app.
|
| Where do we sign up?
| spicyramen_ wrote:
| In main FAANG labs this is already a constant Brain, Facebook
| Research, MSR and AWS. Researchers work with SWEs to deploy
| models and hire hybrids.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Responding to title only, and a little rant:
|
| No, scientists need to stop hand-waving away _everything_ that 's
| not their area as "trivial and not worth talking about" because
| yeah, I've heard that exact line from three separate individuals.
| When I shrugged it off and still produced tools for them that
| shaved off a literal 1-2h out of their day and giving them more
| time to do the actually creative things... they were so overjoyed
| they forgot to say thanks and immediately proceeded to act as if
| the tools were always there. They were extremely careful not to
| show any attribution or even basic human gratitude. Would it kill
| them?
|
| Yeah, frak that crap.
|
| A lot of scientists become severely tunnel-visioned, arrogant,
| conservative, downright disrespectful, and very hard to work
| with. Pile the extremely subpar payment and you really have to
| just be a bored college kid (or an adult with a huge financial
| safety net with a passion for the area) to engage with those
| people in a professional setting at all.
|
| I won't go into details about why I think many are like that
| because frankly, even if I was 100% correct (and my analysis is
| not at all flattering) it still doesn't matter one bit. Lasting
| change comes only from within. Scientists should start holding
| each other to a higher behavioral and collegiate standards and
| expel those who don't comply. Peer pressure works but many are so
| independent and without any oversight that they gradually fall
| under the illusion that their insufferable quirks are a
| personality or a personal touch that helps them excel in their
| area (and it's often the case that they don't excel in it).
|
| Looking down on people because they don't know your extremely
| niche physics research -- that has zero experiments attached to
| it, by the way -- is not helping your cause with people who
| usually get a lot of money AND respect AND a better working
| environment for actually improving your workday. In most cases
| these people will of course go where they are _at least_ not
| looked down upon.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > A lot of scientists become severely tunnel-visioned,
| arrogant, conservative, downright disrespectful, and very hard
| to work with.
|
| Tbf I can replace scientist with developer and it's hold just
| as true.
| pdimitar wrote:
| And you would be correct (and I am saying this as a
| programmer). Truth is, it's extremely easy for us the Homo
| Sapiens to become very set in our ways. :|
|
| I'm 42 and I've had colleagues at 28 year old that already
| act like they belong to a council of elders. Made me super
| sad... they are way too young for that!
| thirtyfivecent wrote:
| smolder wrote:
| Need a software engineer? Hire me, then. My last employer was
| charging $150 an hour for my time, and I'd say most clients felt
| it was a fair deal, or a good one. I quit to do other important
| things with my brief time on earth, and now that I'm looking for
| a software dev role again, it seems I'm hardly worth a third of
| that.
| qfwfq_ wrote:
| I wonder whether this just creates another "underclass" of
| scientific laborers... I think we need tool-builders _as
| academics_. The only thing that academics recognize
| intellectually are peers. The rise of RSEs is a kind of
| intellectual outsourcing... implementation of your science should
| be part-in-parcel to its creation, not deferred to second-class
| non-academic "technicians." The friends and former students I've
| talked to who've entered RSE careers have largely been treated as
| second-class citizens in a research environment _that they_ are
| integral to!
|
| I think, like many things, the buck stops with academia itself,
| its metrics, demands, and incentives. We need more research
| engineering/ _science about science_ academics within compute-
| intensive science departments themselves. Things like JoSS [1] or
| Scientific Data [2] are awesome first steps at addressing this.
|
| [1]: https://joss.theoj.org/
|
| [2]: https://www.nature.com/sdata/
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