Science needs more research software engineers

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/).

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.

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.