I work as a research programmer at a college and prototypes are all we build. However there are very few jobs like this (grant money rarely pays for programmer

I work as a research programmer at a college and prototypes are all we build. However there are very few jobs like this (grant money rarely pays for programmers except a few in big grants and colleges don't have much support for research via engineering and programming staff because it's difficult to justify the overhead for that kind of staff when the need is so variable and students work for cheap or free.) . It's also very different from industry or government jobs, more like being in a startup where you have to train students, deal with many cultures, and do odd jobs (legal analysis, inventory, paperwork, purchasing, etc.) to make things work. Also the prototypes you build often are not actually functional; important parts will be left out or simulated because they are not critical to the research as a proof of concept. It can be frustrating to never build anything that actually accomplishes a functional goal. Pay tends to suck too though that's somewhat location, project, and skill dependent. Medical research has a lot more support positions like this, but requires more specialized skills. And all these jobs are a dead end, there is no place to move up to; the best you can hope for is to eventually become part of a startup or get some extra income from a patent or get a discount on getting a PhD. However, that's not a problem if you're more interested in the research than the money. Projects range from small (a month) to big (5 years) and you'll likely be working on several of them at all times (to make sure there's enough grant money to cover your salary). You'd think there would be a great deal of programming and engineering support for researchers since they are the ones trying to solve the big problems today (except when they're following fads or picking low hanging fruit to build their publish-or-perish careers), but no, most researchers have to do everything themselves with little outside support. Projects end when the students leave or the money runs out, and often that's the end of good ideas. Business rarely adopts them. Occasionally you may get a chance to make a difference. Most of what you'll do has never been done by anyone before, so while you learn a lot due to always working with new technologies, you become expert in nothing since the demands of different projects tend to be very different, and little is re-usable between projects and the skills you learn are somewhat weird, like hacking internals of systems to do something no one in business would ever consider doing. So transitioning back to industry after a time in research could be difficult.