RSEs at the National Labs

[christophernhill]

Charles Ferenbaugh: How do the various national labs deal with RSE hiring, training, career development, ...?

[vsoch]

I’d love to chat about this - having recently transitioned from academia to a national lab it’s really quite different in how the role is viewed, and even the kind of work (as a direct service for researchers vs. actual working on innovating research software and practices). Most national labs don’t even need to jump on the RSE initiative bandwagon because software engineers have always been first class citizens with career tracks, training, and good pay. The kind of RSE work that I love (which is fairly generalist, focused on technology and not running scientific workflows) is a full fledged, valid career path. Coming from the other side, I’m amazed and grateful and just so very lucky! ♥️ I do think that national labs can find more ways to give back to the #rseng community, because both sides would benefit. This would be interesting to talk about.

[omsai]

I would be interested in learning about long term projects started at national labs carried through to mature products. Two frustrations with academic research are overstating impact of the work, and the focus on minimum publishable units over software maintenance (understandable, because of the high personnel turnover and little closed-loop systemic incentive to do so). It would be interesting to hear about experiences at the national labs on topics like:

1. How long term collaboration were built across labs,
2. Public-private partnerships, or
3. General process and organizational models like Pasteur's quadrant of assembling teams early on with people from various stages of the life cycle working together.

[sandragesing]

I would like to understand the differences between the processes of national labs compared to universities in general and also specifically for examples.

[cferenba]

Note that different labs have different approaches for RSEs. For example Oak Ridge and Sandia both have dedicated RSE groups, while Los Alamos doesn't (and probably won't anytime soon).

[vsoch]

And at LLNL we are Computer Scientist-ing!