[secabeen]

We are starting to build up the field of research facilitation, but it's hard to bring together permanent funding for things like this; quality engineers don't want to be on funding that may vanish in 4-5 years, and most universities don't have the culture to put the necessary central funding forward at the scale required.

> For some reason even in academic departments where we can build billion euro clusters the people are still paid utter crap.

Billion euro clusters are one-time money; people expect benefits and durable employment.

[solarkraft]

> quality engineers don't want to be on funding that may vanish in 4-5 years

I may not be a quality engineer, but I'd be interested. That's a long enough time frame for me.

But by what I hear from German academia the pay is bad, the environment is "meh" and the contracts have to be renewed in relatively short periods (yearly?). That makes an otherwise interesting field a hell of a lot harder to choose.

[indigochill]

Haven't national research labs solved this problem? Nobody I talked to at APL seemed to have any concern about shortage of R&D opportunities and although it wasn't Silicon Valley money (which is not sustainable long-term anyway), I don't recall anyone complaining about the salary either.

[nl]

There was a thread on this on HN last month: "Ask HN: Has anyone worked at the US National Labs before?"[1]

Most comments note how the pay is less than FAANG; eg the top voted comments:

"Pay is pretty good by almost any standards except FAANG."

And elsewhere:

"The pay at a DOE lab is less than FAANG (PhD student interns might be around $80k/yr and starting staff scientists maybe $130k/yr), but the tradeoff for some people would be the research-flavor of the work, and the flexibility."

etc etc

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34414527

[fragmede]

If we consider that Silicon Valley started in the 1970s, I'm not sure how much more long term it needs to show to be considered sustainable.

[krageon]

I'm assuming they meant sustainable for a single person. The percentage of people holding such a salary long-term could be very low. I don't know whether or not it is, but that is how I read the comment.

[secabeen]

The national research labs are great, but there are only 17 of those, and they don't employ that many people when compared to the software industry. Good gigs if you can get them, certainly.