work life balance - HOD Oak Ridge National Laboratory Employee Review

great collaboration across different fields

career uncertainty and institutional limitations inherent to a temporary postdoctoral position

I like the people. I like the flexible work hours.

While hours are flexible, if you’re a sole developer supporting small-scale research projects (so no dev team, just you), you will have a bad time. You will end up managing all facets of development (full stack) for 3-4 applications by yourself to cover your time and it’s impossible to keep up with the workload AND learn new things AND attend conferences AND mentor juniors. You log time against the different projects you’re working on pretty much the exact same way consulting firms have billable hours. So you might have 50% of your time paid for by a particular project, but the deliverables could easily demand 100% of your time if you want to do it well. Then you have the other 2-3 projects funding the other 50% of your salary but also each needing 70-100% of your time to meet deliverables. The system is not set up well for developers’ sanity.