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Comment by amcoastal | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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