Research Software Engineer project funding: what’s been working
The “Research Software Engineer” service provides technical collaborators for researchers to complement their scientific knowledge. Read about Aalto RSE here. The idea of this service was that it would be available to everyone, but some projects who made extensive use would fund it themselves.
If you are a group leader reading this, Aalto RSE can help you release research code, debug it, make it reusable, rescue old code from former members and make it usable again, make it run on our cluster or CSC’s clusters, manage data, prepare data for easy use, and so on. If it’s not long (less than a month), our work is free, if it’s more than a month, the below applies.
Early project funding
When we started, we hoped for around 50% project funding. The idea was that a lot of the funding for the service would come from the research projects themselves. This hasn’t really worked out so well, because a) we accomplish the vast majority of our projects quickly, in less than a few weeks, and b) finance would understandably not like to deal with small transactions for small amounts of time.
What actually happened was that we basically have received only a small amount of the project funding we would have wanted. On the other hand, this also means we have supported a far wider variety of projects than we would have otherwise. It also means we are better accomplishing our other goal: tactical support right where and when it’s needed most, with the least amount of administrative overhead. This actually better matches our mission of helping the researchers who need us most.
Future funding prospects
For any long projects (more than a month or so), we still follow do our original plan: we can receive funding from grants (or basic funding) to do long-term projects. This is usually 40-80% of a RSE’s time, spread out over more than a month (and it can also be bursty: lots of work at some times, waiting for the next task at other times). We have done this for projects, and we know we can do it in the future.
But there’s another thing that has worked well: retainer-type funding instead of project-based funding. You have extra funding that needs to be used? You know your group needs support but you can’t name a single specific project to use all the time? Hire RSEs on long-term retainers and we’re there for you as needed. You will always get priority for all the quick questions you have (in Scicomp garage or otherwise), and you get the highest priority for your medium projects, we can attend your other group meetings, and so on. As your team wants, we’ll make high-impact improvements here and there. This could be (for example) anywhere from 10-40% time over a long period.
We have worked out how to do both one-off projects and retainers with Finance. As for as external funders are concerned, our staff count as researchers, so we can use any funding you might have.
If you think you have a project or want us on retainer, let us know: Research Software Engineers or Starting a project with us.
Why are our projects so short?
This is a valid questions. Compared to many RSE groups, we seem to be focusing on many small questions for a broad audience that knows a lot about the problems they need to solve. Thus, we can come in to something already set up well, provide help, and mostly back off and be available for maintenance long-term. The units that fund us (schools, departments) have been happy with this, so we’ve kept it up. On the other hand, we are pretty fast. There have been projects where a summer worker was going to be hired, that we could end up doing (learning the framework + all the main tasks) in two weeks. The way we work together as a team also makes things quite fast. Thus, a project has to be quite deep in order to exceed a month of work.