Science needs more research software engineers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.