You’re sitting in a conference room with your colleagues. And they are discussing the thing. And you first are also engaged, because you have strong opinions about the thing too. But then ten minutes turns to twenty, twenty to thirty, and then it’s been an hour that these folks are still talking about the thing. “My goodness,” you think. They care about the thing much more than I do. One of these things is not like the other, and it’s me. I am different. I’m not sure that I belong here.

This is a story that we often tell ourselves when our environment and people in it suggest to us that our character, desires, or interests deviate from what is expected. In the scope of research software engineering or more generally software engineering it could be that you:

  • Are in a PhD program, but don’t have burning questions about science and I just want to write code.
  • Are in an industry job, and working on software for <insert department here> is not fulfilling.
  • You “don’t have the right background, but…”

One interesting thing about the research software engineering community is that most of us enter it from a place of missing. We are the puzzle pieces that didn’t fit somewhere that we thought we were supposed to, and then we stumble on this concept of a research software engineer, and we meet others that are just as strange as us. And then we have the common thought “Oh my goodness I’m not alone anymore!” or “Perhaps there is a way I can make a career out of this after all!”

Why does this happen? You might guess that we tend to be very critical of ourselves. This usually means that when we encounter other people we start to compare ourselves, one layer at a time, and we worry when we find differences. We also worry when we have some pre-conceived notion of how we are supposed to be, or how we are supposed to fit into our choice of career, and we realize that we don’t.

This story can be harmful if we flag ourselves as not belonging when we really do. It can be harmful if there is an actual need for our skillset that just hasn’t been recognized by an institution, and we leave before it is. So what to do about it? The strongest solution would be to change the environment. Instead of shying away from our differences we should embrace them, champion them, and tell a story of why the thing we are deeply interested in is so important for the community. We should tell a story of not how things are, but how they could be. And we can look around and instead of noticing how the current social or academic structure is so that it doesn’t support us, make it a quest to figure out how it could. With tiny changes over time that change other’s awareness and also allow us to better believe in ourselves, and that we may have different interests but there is room for that, our community will be stronger, retain more talent, and have more potential to change the traditional academic fabric.