What do we know about RSEs? Results from our international surveys

Last year, the Software Sustainability Institute conducted a survey of Research Software Engineers (RSEs) to learn more about them and their work conditions. The RSE community has grown from a concept born at an Institute event to an international phenomenon. It's important to learn more about this community so that our campaigning, and that of our international partners, continues to help RSEs gain the recognition they deserve for their huge contribution to research.

We began surveying RSEs in 2016, in 2017 we also surveyed Canadian RSEs and last year we added four further countries. Our thanks to our partners: Scott Henwood (Canada), Stephan Janosch and Martin Hammitzsch (Germany), Ben van Werkhoven and Tom Bakker (Netherlands), Anelda van der Walt (South Africa) and Daniel Katz and Sandra Gesing (USA).

Diffusion

In total, we analysed 841 responses across the five countries listed below.

Composition of the survey

The base questions for the survey were tailored to meet the requirements of each country. They covered ten subjects:

1. Demographics: traditional social and economic questions, such as gender, age, salary and education.
2. Coding: how much code do RSEs write, how often, and for whom.
3. Employment: questions about where RSEs work and in which disciplines.
4. Current contract: understanding stability of employment by questioning the type of employment contract RSEs receive.
5. Previous employment: understanding routes into the profession the reasons for choosing it.
6. Collaboration and training: who RSEs work with, how many people they work with, and the training they conduct.
7. Publications: do RSEs contribute to publications and are they acknowledged?
8. Sustainability: testing, bus factor, technical handover.
9. Job satisfaction: what do RSEs think about their job and their career?
10. Network: how do RSEs meet and gain representation?

A quick insight into the results

Results differ across countries, but there are a few broad themes that appear common for RSEs around the world (obviously, we'll make some generalisations here, but just go directly to the data as described in the linking to the data section below.

Gender, age and qualifications

RSEs are mainly male and generally found in the 25 to 44 years old age bracket. The majority of them hold a doctorate, except for in Germany where just under half of RSEs have a PhD.

Discipline of study and work

RSEs are most likely to have a degree in: Computer sciences, Physics and Astronomy, or Biology.

RSEs tend to work in the fields of Computer sciences, Biology, and Physics and Astronomy.

However, a closer look at the results shows an interdisciplinary perspective to RSEs work. As shown in this further analysis of the UK results, up to 63% of UK RSEs are working in more than one discipline.

Why choose the RSE career path?

We asked respondents to list in priority order their reasons for choosing the RSE career. The top three responses are shown below. It is the research environment that mainly attracts RSEs, but a desire to advance research is also a major draw. Ultimately, RSEs want to work in research, but do not want to follow a conventional research career path.

The role of RSEs in publications

RSEs make a major contribution to publications, but they are not always acknowledged for doing so (and are named as an author even less frequently).

Tools and working practices

RSEs are keen users of open-source licences for their code, but less frequent users of Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

We asked about testing, the bus factor of their biggest project and the presence of a technical handover plan.

The percentage of RSEs not implementing any form of testing could be argued as rather low, but keeping in mind the importance of their work in producing and publishing research 10% untested code is still a problem. A similar problem is found with the bus factor. The majority response across all countries is a bus factor of 1, making research software highly vulnerable to staff absence or movement.

What languages to RSEs prefer?

There are some differences across countries, but Python is clearly the dominant language among RSEs.

Link to the data

This quick overview only scratches the surface of the data we collected. To get complete access to the available information, you can peruse the Github repository. The data is provided under a Creative Commons by attribution licence. The data and analysis are stored in Zeonodo:

We are currently working on creating the survey for 2018 and hope to run it in July. If you wish to participate, you can find out more from our contribution instructions.