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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

Nothing in this proposal should take 5 years. For $250k you can easily do this research in a single focused year probably.

I imagine researchers must actually be doing multiple grants in parallel or have other main jobs to earn decent money because if they only do this one thing at a time I have no idea why someone would choose this life of poverty when they could be making solid six figures building practical things.

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Folks submitting Career grants already have nominally full-time time jobs as faculty with corresponding full-time salaries. The jobs are usually termed '9-month' appointments to allow them time in the summer to get paid for research. So the 5 year timeline reflects that this is not most of what they are doing. Certainly if you have CS background and you're mostly interested in making money this is not the career path for you.

A lot of the work involves training PhD students to do the research, it’s a big component particularly for NSF funding. So it’s not just the raw research output

And yeah, most professors try to have multiple programs going. This one would have funded one student for a few years

NSF proposals are expressly not designed around funding 100% FTE research positions. "A single focused year" isn't what they're funding.

Yeah, but that's the way these things go. The people working on this project are working on 5 other ones as well. It would be nice to work on fewer research projects at once but the way these grants work (check out the low total amount), its generally unfeasible. Its sort of laughable extremely hard to get grants from the NSF, DoD etc. wouldn't even pay 2 typical FAANG SE 1 year FTE.

I do wonder why academics don't open up research collabs with industrial engineers more frequently (without the corporation involvement). I can think of a half dozen academic research problems which are bottle necked on coding.

That grant proposal should answer your question - what's going to pay for that industrial engineer in that collab? You get $50k/year for 5 years and you can't even pay that to an outside engineer since then your proposal wouldn't fulfill the education goals by having a grad student 'trained' through doing that thing. (quoting OP of what the annual budget covers - "1 month of summer salary for myself, 1 grad student at an above-average salary plus tuition, no equipment, alternating international and domestic conference trips for both myself and the grad student, and funds to pay participants in user studies".

Hire would certainly be a no go, but partnership/volunteer work could be viable. However that also would not meet the criteria of the grant.

As academic, coding is my favorite part. I would not give that up

Especially once we're talking about staff.

Keeping a $100,000 scientific software developer on staff, at 10% hit rates (not out of the ordinary for the NIH), means writing a million dollars of grants per year.

And if one of them is successful, that salary is 40% of the total budget for a non-modular R01.

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