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Science needs more research software engineers

nature.com

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Re: Science needs more research software engineers

#131

Post by konschubert »

sbt wrote: post #126
throwmamatrain wrote: post #60

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…

> 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.

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?

Re: Science needs more research software engineers

#132

Post by inciampati »

jll29 wrote: post #120
bmitc wrote: post #24

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 jus…

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 int…

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 :)

Re: Science needs more research software engineers

#133

Post by exdsq »

konschubert wrote: post #131
sbt wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: Science needs more research software engineers

#134

Post by exdsq »

Azrael3000 wrote: post #54
ethanwillis wrote: post #2

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."

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 uni…

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.

Re: Science needs more research software engineers

#135

Post by skohan »

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.

Re: Science needs more research software engineers

#136

Post by exdsq »

robbomacrae wrote: post #94
maxwell86 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fo…

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...

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.

Re: Science needs more research software engineers

#137

Post by somishere »

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.

Re: Science needs more research software engineers

#138

Post by nurbl »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #97

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 ca…

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.

Re: Science needs more research software engineers

#139

Post by signaru »

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.

Re: Science needs more research software engineers

#140

Post by mattsouth »

PainfullyNormal wrote: post #13

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.

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.
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