So, I was an RSE? Know why I left? Money. It’s all very well being an RSE but there are two ways of being funded (at least here in the UK). One is centrally fu

So, I was an RSE? Know why I left? Money. It’s all very well being an RSE but there are two ways of being funded (at least here in the UK). One is centrally funded by the University - universally this means being shoved into the IT hierarchy which is not a good fit. The other is on an ongoing basis by doing 1-2 year contracts. So no job security. The salaries for both of these are very poor. On leaving I took a 35% pay rise and do basically the same work but in industry. The only difference is that instead of working for engineers in academia, I do work for engineers in companies. Since I jumped, I negotiated another 20% pay rise. If I’d stayed, I’d have got a 3% pay rise. That’s not including the fact I get bonuses, private health insurance, don’t have to pay to park at my own office… The issue is that the skill set demanded to be an RSE is highly desirable in industry - able to write code well, often mathematical, familiarity with much of devops type work. On top of that, researchers don’t truly value your contributions. They don’t want to put you on papers that couldn’t have happened without your work. On top of that, they’re hugely demanding about timescales that are unrealistic. I got put onto one project which had contractual commitments to deliver to a major governmental agency to run a live service, and the guy running the project handed me a 5000 line Python 2.7 script that wouldn’t even run and basically said “get it working”. He couldn’t even supply the input files needed to run it for 2 months after that, just ignored emails. I quit before it got any further. Edit: forgot to add, my boss was a grade higher than me on the national academic salaries scale. He had technical responsibility and also had to line manage 10 people. Even if I could have gotten promoted (impossible - no budget), I didn’t want the line management responsibility. I earn more than the top of that salary band now, and line manage nobody.