Being in such a position, I can say that I am appreciated, but not in a manner that results in job stability and promotion. It's a massive problem in academia,

Being in such a position, I can say that I am appreciated, but not in a manner that results in job stability and promotion. It's a massive problem in academia, and there's an attempt to get the position recognised and call it "Research Software Engineer", with comparable opportunities for promotion and job stability as a researcher. However, it's not going massively well. Academic job progression is still almost completely purely based on the ability to get first or last author papers in top journals. I have lots of papers where I am a middle author, because I wrote the software that did the analysis that was vital for the paper to even exist, but it largely doesn't count. And I'm lucky - many software engineers don't even get put in as a middle author on the paper they contributed to.