The Utility vs the Professional Services Firm
As research computing and data becomes more complex and diverse, we need more professional services firms and fewer utilties (Note: This post is adapted from #127 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) I get to talk with a lot of research computing and data teams - software, data, and systems. Sometimes in these conversations it’s pretty clear that some teams, or the team and their funder, or a team and I, are talking a bit past each other. And that’s usually because they or we...
Continue...What I've Learned from Looking at 1,500 Jobs Leading Research Computing Teams
Job numbers continue to grow; lots of data and product management jobs; IR groups at Universities becoming bigger employers (Note: This post is adapted from #111 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) A year and a half ago I posted my observations on the first 500 jobs posted to the job board - we’re getting close to 1,500 now, and it’s worth taking a look to see what if anything has changed in research computing team leadership and management jobs1. There are some trends that...
Continue...Researcher's Time Has Value, Too
..And Researchers Value Their Time (Note: This post is adapted from #102 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) If you followed HPC twitter in late 2021 at all, you will have seen a heartfelt thread by a well-known research software developer, one who was a key contributor to the Singularity project among others, lamenting the frankly appalling state of developer productivity in HPC - both in what tools exist, and support for them (and other tools for developers) at academic centres. A lot of people...
Continue...To Compete, Your Team Needs a Specialty
And ‘HPC’ or ‘Research Software Development’ isn’t a specialty (Note: This post is adapted from #90 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) Quick: what’s your team’s specialty? Your team’s specialty is its reputation for what it’s good at. Not what you think your team is good at; what matters is what specific thing your stakeholders (funders, clients, institutional decision makers) think your specialty is. What they recommend you for to peers, what they recommend funding you for to decision makers. In the post-pandemic world, researchers...
Continue...Research Computing Funding Should Mostly Just Go To Researchers
Research computing and data — supporting research efforts with software, computer and data expertise and resources — is fundamentally all of a piece. Today there’s fewer and fewer hard boundaries between where the system requirements end and where the software or data resource requirements begin; and teams supporting researchers must have expertise across the stack. This convergence is a huge opportunity for research computing, but it’s also a challenge for funders. How to know how much to allocate to software, and how much to hardware?...
Continue...Nobody Else Cares About Your Tech Stack
Focus on your researchers’ and funders’ problems, not your technical solution (Note: This post is adapted from #75 of the Research Computing Teams Newsletter) Many of us who are managing research computing and data teams come up through the ranks doing research ourselves, and have experience in grantwriting for open research calls. That can actually hold us back from succeeding with getting grants for “digital research infrastructure” — building teams and infrastructure to support research. The thing is, digital research infrastructure calls, the sort that...
Continue...