The issue with money is down to the university overheads. An RSE is paid like a standard researcher (with none of the benefits, recognition etc as detailed in

The issue with money is down to the university overheads. An RSE is paid like a standard researcher (with none of the benefits, recognition etc as detailed in other comments), which means that the university will take, minimum 50% of the grant money for that person. This is for building work, maintenance, general staff, etc etc. But I need a laptop, and I work from home, most of the time the IT staff just get in my way and slow my computer down with the crap they install. If the universities didn't take that cut, we could easily pay the RSEs more. There's no job security, very little recognition, but every single subject requires good code these days. The real issue here is that without decent coders our science will fall behind. Any idiot can write bad code, and smart people can write exceptionally bad code, we've all been there, not writing simple readable code because it made us feel clever, till we had to read it a year later. Academics are smart people who believe they can teach themselves to code, and they can, but it's generally not good software. There are also the ancillary benefits of just having someone around who can do things like rename your hundreds of files by writing a script in 5 minutes rather than you taking two days to do it (this actually happened). For the sake of western science this should be addressed.