Published 28th March 2025

Can you tell us a little bit about your role?

I’m new into the Senior RSE role. I’ve been an RSE for two years. First at Newcastle then at Durham. Before that I was a post-doc, and before that, I was a PhD student. It’s a university department that I’m based in. That comes with all of the usual kind of university status quo, like temporary contracts. We help academics with their research, which I decided was something that I wanted to do, rather than leading my own research. For the moment, I’m very happy for people to come to me with exciting ideas and to go, “I can help with that!” That’s a very rewarding thing to me.

What’s been surprising about the Senior RSE role?

It’s come with a set of responsibilities to other people within the group. […] I don’t have any line management responsibility yet, but I think that’s probably likely to become the case, because our RSE manager is leaving/retiring. It’s a bit up in the air how we deal with that situation, because much like other small RSE teams, he had a “bus factor” of one. He knows where all of the projects are, who has all of the projects, and it’s likely to fall to me to have that in my head next if we don’t find some other way of managing that. We’re using the opportunity of him retiring to take a step back and look at how the group is organised and how we do things. Trying to find what are the (a) more organised and (b) less stressful, ways of doing things.

I’m likely to end up with more line management responsibilities for my colleagues. I think one of the ways we’re going to deal with that is by splitting the group into teams. I’d likely take on the people who are more aligned to web and mobile. And there’s a notional machine learning and HPC group, although this seems like an arbitrary distinction, as I would like to be involved in HPC stuff as well.

I seem to be generally involved more now, which is what I very much wanted from becoming a senior RSE: being involved with the strategy and where the department and the research software engineering group is going in future.

Can you tell me about your involvement within the RSE community?

I think it took me a year to get into the RSE profession and I’m very grateful to the Newcastle team for my experience there. I think it’s quite different from research. Let’s say you have a three year post-doc: the first year you get used to your surroundings; the second year you do your research; and the third year you look for your next job. But with RSE, thankfully, it’s longer term than that. I still spent the first year getting used to my surroundings. That wasn’t just the group I was working within, it was the community, the context and the understanding of what an RSE does. Newcastle was a really good experience for me in terms of understanding what an RSE does, and what an RSE doesn’t do.

I had various different academic projects which I was on, but some of them really needed a researcher, a research postdoc instead of an RSE. That’s given me a really good understanding of… Especially in the senior RSE role, I have a bit more ability to guide academics and say; “you’re putting together this research bid and you’re talking about this as an RSE thing. But, have you considered that you may actually need to start from further back than that?” Rather than just saying; “we’re going to build some software,” maybe you need to understand the context first, and decide if the piece of software that you want to build is appropriate. And maybe that’s a postdoc: sometimes that’s for somebody who has domain-specific knowledge to come in and do that research.

Do you think an RSE with some domain knowledge in the relevant problem can act in that capacity?

Yes. So I think we’re hitting on the difference between embedded RSEs and RSEs. There are embedded RSEs within and outside of ARC at Durham. One of the things I’m trying to do is build contacts with the embedded RSEs who work in departments around the university. Very often they’re people who have domain-specific knowledge. ARC has an RSE who was recruited specifically for his expertise in X-ray crystallography. That’s a perfect example of a long ongoing project which needs domain-specific expertise, but also needs an RSE. But they don’t need to start from the position of “what should we build”, they are starting from the position of “we need this thing”. So a slightly different positioning.

And perhaps there’s also a difference between qualitative and quantitative sciences, or, humanities and STEM? Maybe in the more STEM-focused quantitative projects, it’s easier to find somebody with domain specific knowledge and understand that we need a person who knows the domain as well as the software. Whereas in the digital humanities side of things, perhaps there’s less understanding from a PI perspective of what an RSE is for, and being able to guide that understanding is part of my job… (and perhaps I’m well-placed for that as someone who holds a digital humanities-related PhD).

As someone who’s relatively recently come into being senior. Is there any advice you’d give to your more junior colleagues, or maybe you from a year or two ago, about what to focus on if they want to move into more senior roles?

I can only speak from my perspective. When I think of me a year ago, I knew what I needed to do, and I’ve been doing it. I was trying to get involved in communities, be enthusiastic, trying to do stuff with people, build contacts, build networks, let people know who I am, let people know that I’m there to help out, to be visible and active and helpful and volunteering within the community. Helping out on the EDIA working group, and then this week at RSECon doing a lightning talk and a panel at the leaders meeting, a panel on Tuesday about coding confessions, and a hackathon in the morning on Wednesday. Just getting involved with loads of really interesting and cool stuff. 

Then looking inwards as well, trying to identify within your department or university where the gaps are, and where you could personally push stuff forward. Because it’s no good saying, “somebody should do this!” If you find yourself in the position of saying “somebody should do this,” it means that nobody will ever do it. Instead of saying “somebody should do this”, say “I’m going to do this.” But, that’s potentially got implications for your workload, so it’s important to manage it well too.

But it’s the route that I took, and I think if you have supportive management, they are generally more than happy for you to use your time to do volunteering and to do useful community building stuff, without it being extracurricular. Although to be honest, I do spend a lot of my outside-of-work hours thinking about this too.

The other thing is perhaps academia itself, and having come through the route of doing a PhD and then going into the RSE role, has predisposed me to burnout because that’s kind of what a PhD does. It’s a research project, it’s your own thing, you take it, you run with it for however many years it takes, and you throw yourself at it– until somebody gives you a piece of paper! You’ve got to be really careful if you’ve come that route to take time for yourself and have a healthy work-life balance.

Do you have any specific advice on how you’ve managed to avoid that as much as you can?

It takes a long time to build a personal understanding of when you are starting to feel burned out. For me, particularly being neurodiverse (ASD/ADHD), I’m predisposed to that because I hyper-focus. When I get a nice self-contained project (especially a coding project) I will absolutely lock onto it like a laser-guided missile and I have a propensity to spend more time than my work hours working on it. That’s how I got a PhD. I was hyper focused, but that’s not actually a healthy behaviour within the work context. And being able to identify that and say “that’s not a healthy behaviour,” and begin to recognize the signs of when I’m stressed and the signs of being burned out– I had to do that the hard way. There was no easy piece of advice, signs I could look out for. It’s very much an internal thing.

Knowing that’s a multi-stage process of, identifying and then putting in place stuff like; next weekend is a long weekend, I’m going to take some annual leave around it so that I can have a bit of downtime. It’s difficult to manage burnout, but it is possible. And actually, going into this senior role and taking on line management responsibilities, that’s something I’m going to be probably more careful of, and try to be aware of for members of the team who have a similar inclination. Having a more pastoral sit down every week, or couple of weeks, whenever people are comfortable with… Then asking “Are you OK?”. Not, “have you done the piece of work?”. “Are you OK?”

As a neurodivergent person, do you have any strategies that you think might help everyone?

First of all, I would be very surprised if a large percentage of the RSE population was not neurodivergent, because I think possibly research and software engineering are both things which attract neurodiverse people, and we are therefore overrepresented in. Then bring those two together, it would not be a surprise to me at all to find out that there was a concentrating effect there. 

There are multiple coping techniques that you can do, and a lot of mine are technology assisted. So I have checklists on my phone in the morning for getting out of bed, because a couple of years ago I realised that I was taking like an hour to get out of the house in the morning, and a lot of that was standing around feeling a bit lost, because one of the things my brain doesn’t do easily is know what the next thing to do is. It’s called “executive dysfunction.” So I wrote a flow chart and I stuck it to my door: Have you got your keys? Have you got your phone? Have you brushed your teeth? Have you had breakfast? That was something that I did in kind of a lo-fi way. Routine is something which helps me a lot. At three o’clock in the afternoon I’ve got an alarm which goes off, which says it’s time to take a break, because otherwise I won’t.

There are apps, which if it works for you, great! I really like Finch. It’s a little app. It’s kind of like a Tamagotchi, but it grows through you doing the things that you need to do in your life. I also use a mood tracker called Daylio, which helps me see the patterns of burnout. Because it seems to be a monthly or every few months cycle, I’ll be in a good mood and then I’ll come back down on a sine wave. Limiting the low parts of that wave is a challenge, but recognizing that it is a wave and that if you’re feeling a bit down, it will pass, is quite useful.

There’s also support available from the government from Access to Work. Accessing diagnosis for neurodiversity is a pain in the bum! You either need to have the money to do it– in which case you can do it, but you still have to wait, or you have to wait even longer for NHS diagnosis (other countries may vary).

Accessing diagnosis, the reason I went for it is because it gives you easier access to reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act 2010, protection under relevant disabilities legislation, and access to funding for assistance. So when I went into my position at Durham, I applied through the Department for Work and Pensions to the Access to Work scheme, which can give a grant to support people with disabilities in getting into work. They made funding available which bought me a set of noise-cancelling headphones at the desk, a light shield for working in the office, and eight sessions of one-to-one tuition on coping mechanisms (which to be honest was of varying usefulness, and at times a little patronising). It probably helps some people more than others. Access to diagnosis will get you access to resources like that.

There still is not, especially for ADHD, good support available. Especially with things like deadlines. “I couldn’t hit that deadline because I have ADHD”. It’s a disability, and coming to terms with that is genuinely hard because it requires you to examine your own internalised ableism. I’ve spent years developing coping mechanisms for deadlines, because I leave it all to the last minute and then pull all-nighters to get done. The work wasn’t terrible, but I think my PhD was a kind of fly-or-die gauntlet to develop the skills to plan work in advance, split it up, do a little bit every day: it’s just too big to do at the last minute. I still struggle with deadlines, but I’m better at it than I used to be! There isn’t a good solution to that, and there’s a big lack of awareness in the workplace around neurodiversity being literally disabling. But maybe there’s a solution from the part of people who set those deadlines, and organisations that provide access to that support. Maybe just don’t have deadlines: lots of grant schemes are adopting a rolling application process these days.

Is there anything your colleagues, either at Durham or Newcastle, or even from before, is there anything they do that helps?

From a management perspective, when I was an RSE at Newcastle, I said to my manager, Mark, “I need a bit more support at the moment, because I’m not doing so well.” We had a much more one-to-one level of support on a much more regular basis than I need now. So now I meet my manager, Ed, every two weeks, because I’m doing better within myself than I was at that time, I need less support. 

From a management perspective, people who manage neurodiverse people need to know that they need to make that support open and available, and be open about “you can come to me with this stuff”. It’s certainly not workload-modelled, especially within the university perspective. You don’t get more time to manage neurodiverse staff. So you’re going to lose time elsewhere in doing that, but you need to do that as a manager. It’s essential– and it’s pretty rewarding to see someone doing well. I think anybody who manages people knows that some people need more support than others. 

Understanding that support needs will change over time is also important. One person who might need support more often may get into a place where they’re doing better in themselves, where you can say, “well, do we need to meet every week now?”. If the answer is yes, then we’ll keep doing that. It might be that they’re doing better because they’re continuing to be well supported, and reducing that support need is going to be counter-productive.

Can you comment on being a neurodiverse manager?

I think probably being a neurodiverse manager supports me in managing neurodiverse team members. I’ve seen that in terms of working with a colleague who has ADHD. Working together with somebody who has ADHD knowing that because of my own experience that there is potentially a propensity to focus on the wrong thing. What we did in that project is, we sat down every week and went, what needs doing next week? What’s being done this week? And are you doing okay? Like, wrapping those things together seems to work well.

But I don’t know, I think there is a really easy trap within research software engineering as a profession to overwork people and get them burned out. I think probably people with ADHD and/or autism are more predisposed to that. I guess I am more aware of that from my own experience as a neurodiverse manager. It highlights the importance of the diversity of the makeup of a research software engineering team in having people who have different forms of neurodiversity, do have different identities, do have different ethnic and international backgrounds.

There are also challenges in being neurodiverse– autistic, especially– and interacting with a team of people. I try to take care to remember that the way I see the world isn’t always the same as others do. I try to be open and approachable because sometimes I can be very blunt without realising it, and I need colleagues to be able to come to me to let me know. There are strengths, like hyper-focus, which are also weaknesses, like executive dysfunction. It’s not all bad and it’s not all good: it’s just important to recognise that neurodiversity isn’t a super-power, like sometimes the media portrays it. It’s part of who I am and what I do, and I’m still learning the ins and outs of what exactly that is!