Me: Recent graduate (2012), early career. All dev, all the time.
Lead Dev: ~15-20 years experience, minor project management tasks, mostly just dev work. Gets author credit on scientists' papers every once in a while for his help in generating visualizations.
Principal Investigator: 30-40 years experience, created the software package that we develop in the early 90s, almost entirely project management.
Our organization doesn't expect publications from us (though they're a perk at raise time). There are a few conferences that we present at annually, some posters to make, but for the most part, I just write software that helps scientists do their jobs better. I'm just down the hall from some of the leading minds in climate science, and it's really a great environment.
Of course, our lab varies wildly internally; any different project could have a drastically different experience, and different departments would have very different expectations.