> But, you will get paid SIGNIFICANTLY less than you would doing almost anything else
Yes definitely true, a junior software engineer in industry earns about as much as a Professor in academia. How would you justify such a salary at the university?
> have zero autonomy,
I've written that before. I would argue it's the complete opposite, autonomy is the one big advantage of academia. If you are a software engineer you likely have even more autonomy than most others, because your work is not directly linked to conference/grant deadlines etc. typically you would be given very rough guidelines on what you should try to achieve and then left to your own devices for long periods of time. Most PIs would neither have the time or expertise to micromanage a software engineer.
> and get no respect.
Again not my experience at all. I know that in my area people would respect a software engineer. I know when my partner was working as a research assistant in a medical lab, I wrote a small script to process some huge spreadsheet that they always processed by hand (work that took sometimes several weeks). They treated me like a god and even wanted to include me on the paper. The thing to remember though is you will not be considered a researcher, so likely not get grant funding and your job progression would always be in more technical roles, not in the academic track. I still don't see any difference in respect.
Respect could mean different things to different people, but I find the things you wrote not to be very respectful, but being nice in my evaluation.
I have worked in a research lab. While the folks I worked with respected my work, what I would actually consider respectful is including me in the design of the work, not giving me my part of work after they designed the thing they want to work on. And while most job industry is not good in this respect, working in research lab is worse than that. Almost all research labs treats SWE like cost center[0].
> Respect could mean different things to different people, but I find the things you wrote not to be very respectful, but being nice in my evaluation.
> I have worked in a research lab. While the folks I worked with respected my work, what I would actually consider respectful is including me in the design of the work, not giving me my part of work after they designed the thing they want to work on. And while most job industry is not good in this respect, working in research lab is worse than that. Almost all research labs treats SWE like cost center[0].
I don't quite understand your point, do you mean that you as an SRE want to be involved in the grant being written? That might be appropriate if the grant is directly on the topic of software, but completely inappropriate if the SRE writes the labautomation software to be used in the grant. So if the researcher asks you to write a GUI to some lab-instrument for example is that being disrespectful?
Regarding your citation, I also don't get it. The text says that MBAs consider SWEs as cost centers, so that implies it's worse in industry (there's very few MBAs running research labs). I can also tell you that academics are largely considered cost centres by university admin.
Yes definitely true, a junior software engineer in industry earns about as much as a Professor in academia. How would you justify such a salary at the university?
> have zero autonomy,
I've written that before. I would argue it's the complete opposite, autonomy is the one big advantage of academia. If you are a software engineer you likely have even more autonomy than most others, because your work is not directly linked to conference/grant deadlines etc. typically you would be given very rough guidelines on what you should try to achieve and then left to your own devices for long periods of time. Most PIs would neither have the time or expertise to micromanage a software engineer.
> and get no respect.
Again not my experience at all. I know that in my area people would respect a software engineer. I know when my partner was working as a research assistant in a medical lab, I wrote a small script to process some huge spreadsheet that they always processed by hand (work that took sometimes several weeks). They treated me like a god and even wanted to include me on the paper. The thing to remember though is you will not be considered a researcher, so likely not get grant funding and your job progression would always be in more technical roles, not in the academic track. I still don't see any difference in respect.