It's a hard task to define a research software engineer, as the role can emcompass a wide set of skill sets and tasks. Since we don't have a good way to derive a single definition that everyone can agree on, by collecting example job descriptions for what an RSE does, we can start to understand the what skills and responsibilities are commonly associated with being an RSE. In the future you could imagine doing a small similarity analysis to compare descriptions, or an assessment of which skills are most saught for, and which are more rare. For now, it's just a collection of descriptions, and you can continue reading to learn how to add your description.
The job descriptions are rendered out of _posts, and having them as posts is done intentionally so there is a date associated with the description. Adding a job description comes down to creating a new file in this folder, and writing up the description. Sections that are recommended (but not required) include:
- Job Description: an overview of the job
- Responsibilities: a list of the main responsibilities assocated with the role
- Essential Qualifications: what you think are absolutely necessary.
- Preferred Qualifications: "Would be nice, but not essential."
- Education: the minimum education that you think is required
It's important to remember that the language that we use can be biased to select for different groups, or even the choices we make in the description. You should make sure that your description does not have gender or other kinds of bias. Once you've written your post, you can submit a pull request to this repository to have it reviewed, approvied, and merged.
The following would be great!
- Adding resources to ensure non-biased posts
- Analysis to compare similarity of different parts of posts (and entire)
- Analysis to extract common (and uncommon) features of descriptions
If you have any questions or would like to contribute, either via a job description or work on the site, please open an issue!