Speaking from my experience. All comments here are my own. - Exceptional work/life balance that you will not find anywhere else. - I started at 100k fresh out

Speaking from my experience. All comments here are my own. - Exceptional work/life balance that you will not find anywhere else. - I started at 100k fresh out of masters program, at 5 YOE I was 150k. Goes up steadily YoY. - The labs operate like a variety of small businesses. This is because there are many projects and funding sources from a variety of customers. - From what I hear some labs are super relaxed. Like Los Alamos. The working environment is unlike any other. - It is typical for teams to be in the same building but have no idea about each other. Overlap and rework is common, but is improving. - Performance reviews depends on the lab and whatever review process du jour HR wants. Where I am you are in competition with your peers. Limited bonus money. So you’ll need to go above and beyond your peers to get it. - day to day is: you work on one or more projects that last anywhere from weeks to years and report to that projects principle investigator. The PI will interface with the customer and get funding. - for software development we need to go through strict security processes that dictate what libraries and dev tools we can use. We use self hosted versions of popular tools like Mattermost and Gitlab. No cloud. GovCloud is typically too expensive for most customers unless your working on very well funded projects. - Managers are hands off and mostly there to ensure corporate compliance activities get done. E.g training, timesheet, perf reviews,etc. - High level of autonomy. So your expected to be knowledgeable in your area, able to learn quickly and able to work with and network with others to deliver results quickly to customers. For example, you might be tasked with implementing an algo a staff scientist came up with in C++ for an ARM board. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t done that before. Your expected to learn C++, get a demo out, and maybe you can pull in some colleagues you previously worked with who are experts to help. - There is a political structure in place and reputation is important. While it may not be as intense as FAANG, and underperforming is likely not to get you fired, if you consistently underperform folks will remember and your reputation will be permanently ruined. Which will result in not being picked for more desirable projects. And likely shunned. I’ve seen it happen a few times. The lab was going to be a brief stint on my way to FAANG but will likely turn into my career.