Being a research software engineer is rooted in not being noticed. People in our roles, or more specifically those that write code, create infrastructure and tooling, or clean data for research projects have not historically been given credit for that work, as the credit usually goes to the star scientist(s) on the paper. Many of us didn’t even have titles that meant anything across different universities - research software engineers could be postdocs that never left the role, “Research Associates” that took on that title and then were never promoted again, or some cryptic title like “Sftwre Dvelper II” that was practically embarrassing to share. If you are one to like to work behind the scenes, maybe this has been a good experience for you. But if you want to get credit for your work, and possibly noticed and promoted, the environment historically hasn’t been there for us.
Things are starting to get better with initiatives like The Journal of Open Source Software that exists primarily to support publication and citation of research software, and even services like Zenodo that let you skip the paper and just craft a digital object identifier (DOI). Even GitHub now allows for adding a CITATION.cff file that will make it easier for others to cite your software, and national RSE organizations are even making a point to showcase hidden work. But is this really enough? If you look at the number of RSEs that are active on social media platforms like Twitter, or actively maintain blogs to write about their work and self promote, you might guess that we’re not there yet. Should we need to self-promote so heavily to get our work noticed and experience possible benefits that come from that? It’s debatable. But let’s step back for a second and recognize that we can better think of ways to support one another. Whether it’s a new idea for a conference, community blog, or other event or initiative to champion the role of the research software engineer, these are initiatives that we (as individuals) can dream up and make happen. If you are telling yourself the story that you aren’t qualified, then perhaps you should visit that page and think twice about it.