Science needs more research software engineers

> 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.

> 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.

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...

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.

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.