251–260 of 366 posts
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.
If anyone has ideas, I'm all ears!
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.
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/ )
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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 doin…
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 area…
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.
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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 th…
I'm aware of several academics that are banking 1M+ annual providing consulting services.
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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?
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 departm…
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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…
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…
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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…
> 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 softwar…
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.
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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 departm…
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 condescensio…
> 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".
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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?
I've honestly yet to meet a research software engineer without a PhD because of the academic bias you will get in, well, academia.
Pay is quite good, though, so I can't complain.