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This is pretty much my job. I develop climate analysis software at a DOE national lab. We have a pretty reasonable career ladder for the "research software engi

This is pretty much my job. I develop climate analysis software at a DOE national lab. We have a pretty reasonable career ladder for the "research software engineer". A quick sample: Me: Recent graduate (2012), early career. All dev, all the time. Lead Dev: ~15-20 years experience, minor project management tasks, mostly just dev work. Gets author credit on scientists' papers every once in a while for his help in generating visualizations. Principal Investigator: 30-40 years experience, created the software package that we develop in the early 90s, almost entirely project management. Our organization doesn't expect publications from us (though they're a perk at raise time). There are a few conferences that we present at annually, some posters to make, but for the most part, I just write software that helps scientists do their jobs better. I'm just down the hall from some of the leading minds in climate science, and it's really a great environment. Of course, our lab varies wildly internally; any different project could have a drastically different experience, and different departments would have very different expectations.

jwoah12 11y ago
There are no promotions between entry-level and lead dev? I don't know that I'd call it a reasonable career ladder if the second rung is 15 years away.
- dagw 11y ago
  Are regular promotions that important? As long as I get keep getting to do interesting work and keep getting reasonable raises I'm quite happy with my job title not changing more than once a decade.
  - chaosphere2112 11y ago
    Pretty much this, yeah. We do have some intermediate tiers, but they don't really effect your work duties.
  - jwoah12 11y ago
    I suppose not. I'm just used to compensation and responsibilities being tied closely to promotions. There just needs to be some way that the organization regularly recognizes people for doing a good job, so however that materializes is fine.
- chaosphere2112 11y ago
  There are 'promotions', but they're basically entirely disconnected from day-to-day work. I'm a 2; the lead is a 4, my boss is a 6 (all in the technical track). There's a separate management track, which has very similar salaries to technical ones (maybe 10-15% higher), which leave you with plenty of time to do technical tasks (management tasks account for 10-50% of a person's time, depending on the level of management), and I assume there is a tier where they don't disclose the salary structure for "executives" (major organizational leads). I'll get promoted to a 3 at some point in the next year or two; then I'll be a 3 for a really long time (with annual raises), and eventually get bumped to a 4.
- cmsmith 11y ago
  My lab (US Gov.) is the same, except there are is also no title change for the top level. I've been a 'Research Structural Engineer' for two years, and work with people who have been a 'Research Structural Engineer' for 40 years. They get paid a bit more, and have generally put in some time with a 'Group Leader' title, but they don't get saluted in the halls. The consensus is that this promotes a more egalitarian culture, and prevents people from being locked in to roles they don't prefer. Senior staff are free to spend a few years managing a large project or in a leadership role, then back off to get back into the research.
laurencerowe 11y ago
I think the organisational structure makes a huge difference. National labs are large enough for there to be a career structure as software engineer. Working in a university 'lab', our jobs are completely dependent on our PI's ability to continue winning grants. The problem space is fascinating (genomics) and the scientists I work with are really great. But as an experienced developer joining the group, it often feels more like a long consulting gig than a career move.
- chaosphere2112 11y ago
  Yeah, that's fair. If all of our grants dried up, my organization would float me for a period of time and farm me out to other projects. We have enough project flow (and too few people) to make it pretty easy.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  But a university (or a department) could manage a centralized set of software developers who get assigned to different lab projects over time. If Professor A's grant goes away, then you just pick up more work on Professor B's grant and Professor C's -- all of which would be managed by the university or department, and not separately managed by each of the professors. Universities already do this for essential services like janitorial work, administrative work, and centralized IT provisioning, like university-wide email or supercomputing infrastructure. They even already try to do this to some degree with software. For example, there's been a lot of software-focused hiring at the Cornell Weill school in New York City, and some political science research groups at NYU banded together to hire some big data and development staff to service more than just one professor's line of grant-funded projects. The problem is that they still fundamentally undervalue software labor and look at a programmer as simulatenously a low-level grunt and a wizard. You're a low-level grunt because your opinion isn't supposed to matter as much as a domain expert's opinion and your 'creative' contributions (in terms of expressing the research idea in software) is supposed to be less valuable than the domain experts' creative work in coming up with the ideas in a more abstract sense. But you're also supposed to be a magic wizard because you're supposed to juggle unreasonable and conflicting sets of requirements, overcome fundamental computational complexity hurdles, and take a bunch of crappy copy/paste code that none of the domain experts are interested in properly refactoring, and somehow make all of that work correctly, reproducibly, and acceptably fast all in time for various paper and reviewer deadlines.
cwal37 11y ago
ORNL? Maybe we could get lunch sometime, I've been curious about the computational climate stuff since I got here.
- chaosphere2112 11y ago
  LLNL, actually :) We collaborate with the folks in that group, though!
  - cwal37 11y ago
    Oh cool, I was out there for a summer in grad school making Sankey diagrams and working on some conceptual stuff for cities research. I definitely miss the bay area. Haha, I figured at the very least you'd be in contact with some people here, lots of climate stuff going on.

jwoah12 11y ago

There are no promotions between entry-level and lead dev? I don't know that I'd call it a reasonable career ladder if the second rung is 15 years away.

dagw 11y ago
Are regular promotions that important? As long as I get keep getting to do interesting work and keep getting reasonable raises I'm quite happy with my job title not changing more than once a decade.
- chaosphere2112 11y ago
  Pretty much this, yeah. We do have some intermediate tiers, but they don't really effect your work duties.
- jwoah12 11y ago
  I suppose not. I'm just used to compensation and responsibilities being tied closely to promotions. There just needs to be some way that the organization regularly recognizes people for doing a good job, so however that materializes is fine.
chaosphere2112 11y ago
There are 'promotions', but they're basically entirely disconnected from day-to-day work. I'm a 2; the lead is a 4, my boss is a 6 (all in the technical track). There's a separate management track, which has very similar salaries to technical ones (maybe 10-15% higher), which leave you with plenty of time to do technical tasks (management tasks account for 10-50% of a person's time, depending on the level of management), and I assume there is a tier where they don't disclose the salary structure for "executives" (major organizational leads). I'll get promoted to a 3 at some point in the next year or two; then I'll be a 3 for a really long time (with annual raises), and eventually get bumped to a 4.
cmsmith 11y ago
My lab (US Gov.) is the same, except there are is also no title change for the top level. I've been a 'Research Structural Engineer' for two years, and work with people who have been a 'Research Structural Engineer' for 40 years. They get paid a bit more, and have generally put in some time with a 'Group Leader' title, but they don't get saluted in the halls. The consensus is that this promotes a more egalitarian culture, and prevents people from being locked in to roles they don't prefer. Senior staff are free to spend a few years managing a large project or in a leadership role, then back off to get back into the research.

laurencerowe 11y ago

I think the organisational structure makes a huge difference. National labs are large enough for there to be a career structure as software engineer. Working in a university 'lab', our jobs are completely dependent on our PI's ability to continue winning grants. The problem space is fascinating (genomics) and the scientists I work with are really great. But as an experienced developer joining the group, it often feels more like a long consulting gig than a career move.

chaosphere2112 11y ago
Yeah, that's fair. If all of our grants dried up, my organization would float me for a period of time and farm me out to other projects. We have enough project flow (and too few people) to make it pretty easy.
p4wnc6 11y ago
But a university (or a department) could manage a centralized set of software developers who get assigned to different lab projects over time. If Professor A's grant goes away, then you just pick up more work on Professor B's grant and Professor C's -- all of which would be managed by the university or department, and not separately managed by each of the professors. Universities already do this for essential services like janitorial work, administrative work, and centralized IT provisioning, like university-wide email or supercomputing infrastructure. They even already try to do this to some degree with software. For example, there's been a lot of software-focused hiring at the Cornell Weill school in New York City, and some political science research groups at NYU banded together to hire some big data and development staff to service more than just one professor's line of grant-funded projects. The problem is that they still fundamentally undervalue software labor and look at a programmer as simulatenously a low-level grunt and a wizard. You're a low-level grunt because your opinion isn't supposed to matter as much as a domain expert's opinion and your 'creative' contributions (in terms of expressing the research idea in software) is supposed to be less valuable than the domain experts' creative work in coming up with the ideas in a more abstract sense. But you're also supposed to be a magic wizard because you're supposed to juggle unreasonable and conflicting sets of requirements, overcome fundamental computational complexity hurdles, and take a bunch of crappy copy/paste code that none of the domain experts are interested in properly refactoring, and somehow make all of that work correctly, reproducibly, and acceptably fast all in time for various paper and reviewer deadlines.

cwal37 11y ago

ORNL? Maybe we could get lunch sometime, I've been curious about the computational climate stuff since I got here.

chaosphere2112 11y ago
LLNL, actually :) We collaborate with the folks in that group, though!
- cwal37 11y ago
  Oh cool, I was out there for a summer in grad school making Sankey diagrams and working on some conceptual stuff for cities research. I definitely miss the bay area. Haha, I figured at the very least you'd be in contact with some people here, lots of climate stuff going on.