Q: Where can I find jobs a research scientist? A: The army core of engineers is hiring. I write code there. A: I'm at UMich we have been discussing support for research. We they think we should help scientist write code. Historically research groups just had a random programmer that would do thing for them.
Q: Can you say more about how this works at UMich? A: Groups steal and borrow programmers from each other. But they have not figured out how to make providing programmers a service to research groups. The school is risk averse and afraid of change.
I come from HEDP where scientist write code and its bad. Having experienced programmers would be a huge help. The issue is that programmers get less $$ in research than industry. So how do we connect programmers that would be fine with this with researchers.
James: Some people are okay we accepting prestige as payment sometimes. People won't do it if they are expected to be servants and underpaid.
There is a difference in the UK. People in the UK they make 50-60k USD but here they make 100k USD. You can be a little uncompetitive, but not this bad. The DOE and DOD have noticed this.
But it is a challenge to get extra money from the university.
You have to get a lot of people, together and say a programmer would be worth 5 grad students.
Who would put 20% of their next grant to a programmer.
Now all US proposals must have a data management plan. This is where you can money for programmers now. My university now has a cyber institute (???) that does this. So make a gang like this at your university. From University of North Carolina
I'm from U Minnesota Super computing institute. 10ish years ago we started up a service nucleus around the supercomputer. It is a resource everyone shares so we should have institutional support for service.
The Q about grants leads to the Q about hard vs soft money. Its hard to bring in a programmer on soft money, and it shows a lack of support for the programmer. The idea of putting progs on grants is good, but we need harder money for them.
It's basically a management issue. Diff managers handle getting programmers differently. But going back to the issue about grant proposals, how do you convey the added value a programmer brings.
Should this (programming support) be a resource a university provides, like a library.
Mary Jo: If from the snow and ice center at UC Boulder. We support 100ish warm bodies, 99 of them are self funded. 14 of them are developers in a agile model. It breaks down with a pure research model. Its a success center.
James: I wonder if our group is doing it right with how centralized it is. It could be on a lab to lab basis.
I work at UChicago and I'm a scientific computing consultant, with hard and soft funding with domain specific expertise. So people are more willing to work with me.
Q to ^: How do you approach your clients
A: We go to them but their starting to come to us.
I work at Berkeley and I write a lot of grants. In the Social Sciences it is hard to get computational thinking into the process and we need help. It is also hard to find people to bounce my ideas off of.
We've had a lot of questions, mixed models etc. Do people think research progs should be able to offer a full career path, like tenure track. What level of stability should we offer?
A: I moved to Industry from academia recently. It should look like a regular job. Slightly more stable than a post doc.
I agree with that!
I just finished a 2 year contract. It was originally supposed to be a post doc, but they hired me instead. I don't care much for job security.
I can't be a nomad for life. I need to build a family.
Why is this bad for research?
My background is Midevil History and I ended up in statistics. Most social scientist have an idea about statistics. People are afraid to write programmers into grants because they are afraid to hire people to do something they themselves can't do. A managerial structure helps this.
In academia there is no real safe track to a career (tenure doesn't always happen).
One track that is overlooked is the librarian track. Digital librarian faculty seems to be similar.
I'm a contractor for the Nat Library of Medicine. It is a hybrid. Everyone there is hard money. NIH has a dichotomy of hard money softmoney. They give a bunch of soft money away and they have people they always pay. NIH makes a bunch of software tools open source available for free.
On Thursday there a workshop on sustainable science.
If you are a research software engineer please refer to yourself as such.