Simon Hettrick
Professor Simon Hettrick is Deputy Director of the Software Sustainability Institute, and a Director of the Southampton Research Software Group.
We need careers for Research Software Engineers
By Simon Hettrick
13 January 2016 - DIAMOND
ORCID: 0000-0002-6809-5195
Why me?
Software
Sustainability
Institute
www.software.ac.uk
@SoftwareSaved
UKRSE
Association
www.rse.ac.uk
@ResearchSoftEng
Research Software Group
University of Southampton
www.rsg.soton.ac.uk
@RSGsoton
Confession
...I'm not a Research Software Engineer
"We rely on expert developers to provide the tools we need for research, and then penalise them for doing so" [1]
The problem
The traditional research group...
Postdocs
PhDs
Investigators
Postdocs
PhDs
Investigators
Research
Group
Research
Funding
Publications
Data
Software
*Refs [2-4]
Use
software
Fundamental to
results
Time spent coding
Primarily self-taught
69%
92%
30%
90%
We need a new role in research
"The people in research who write code, not papers"
We need a name
The name is not Postdoc
Research
Software engineering
+
=
Research Software Engineer
The RSE
campaign
March 2013
Recognition
+
Reward
Recognition
Workshops and events
UKRSE Association
Press
Lobbying stakeholders
Growth of UKRSE Association
Growth of Research Software Groups
Research Software Groups
-
University of Bristol
-
Culham Centre for Fusion Energy
-
Diamond
-
Imperial College London
-
King’s College London
-
London School of Economics
-
University of Manchester
-
University of Oxford
-
University of Sheffield
-
Software Sustainability Institute
-
UCL
-
University of Southampton
Growth of UKRSE Association
Growth of Research Software Groups
RSE used as formal job title
RSEs on the agenda
RSE used by research stakeholders
RSE Fellowship and RSE Network
It never ends...
Reward
Recognition Reward
\neq
Position and salary
commensurate with contribution
We need a career path
...here be Dragons
Skills and responsibilities
RSE Survey
Coming February 2016
The pledge
4 universities to adopt the RSE career plan by 2019
What does this mean for DIAMOND?
Join the UKRSE
Complete the RSE survey
RSEs are fundamental to research
The RSE community has mobilised over the last 3 years
Issues relating to RSEs are increasingly on the research agenda
Now it's time for career paths to be instated
Summary
References
[1] http://www.scientific-computing.com/news/news_story.php?news_id=2737
[2] "It's impossible to conduct research without software, say 7 out of 10 UK researchers"http://www.software.ac.uk/blog/2014-12-04-its-impossible-conduct-research-without-software-say-7-out-10-uk-researchers
[3] Hannay JE, Langtangen HP, MacLeod C, Pfahl D, Singer J, et al.. (2009) How do scientists develop and use scientific software? In: Proceedings Second International Workshop on Software Engineering for Computational Science and Engineering. pp. 1–8. doi:10.1109/SECSE.2009.5069155.
[4] Prabhu P, Jablin TB, Raman A, Zhang Y, Huang J, et al.. (2011) A survey of the practice of computational science. In: Proceedings 24th ACM/IEEE Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. pp. 19:1–19:12. doi:10.1145/2063348.2063374.
[5] http://www.software.ac.uk/blog/2013-08-23-ten-reasons-be-research-software-engineer
Contact
s.hettrick@software.ac.uk
20160113 - Why we need careers for Research Software Engineers
By Simon Hettrick
20160113 - Why we need careers for Research Software Engineers
Seminar at DIAMOND
