Here's the problem with hiring a pro. The workhorse NIH grant[0] is a R01 with a $250,000/year x 5 years "modular" budget. Most labs have, at most, one. Some h

Here's the problem with hiring a pro. The workhorse NIH grant[0] is a R01 with a $250,000/year x 5 years "modular" budget. Most labs have, at most, one. Some have two, and a very few have more than that. This covers everything involved in the research: salaries (including the prof's), supplies, publication fees, etc. Suppose you find a programmer for $75k. With benefits/fringe (~31% for us, all-in), that's nearly $100k/year. If the principal investigator (prof, usually) takes a similar amount out of the grant, there's very little money left to do the (often very expensive) work. In contrast, you can get a student or postdoc for far less--and they might even be eligible for a training grant slot, TAship, or their own fellowship, making their net cost to the lab ~$0. This would be easy to fix: the NIH already has a program for staff scientists, the R50. However, they fund like two dozen per year; that number should be way higher. [0] Other mechanisms exist at the NIH--and elsewhere--but NSF (etc) grants are often much smaller.