Since nobody's said it yet: if you want to talk with people working in nat'l labs, a good place would be the US Research Software Engineer association. Go to h

Since nobody's said it yet: if you want to talk with people working in nat'l labs, a good place would be the US Research Software Engineer association. Go to https://us-rse.org/join/ https://us-rse.org/join/ and fill out the form to get a Slack invite :) edit: obviously all the people commenting here are really helpful but you'd get a wider range of perspectives there