I worked at something a bit like the Allen Institute, but that is governed by a public university. It's not an issue if done right.
We collaborated with them quite a bit by the way, and they faced almost exactly the same issues. Salaries aren't that good really (maybe 10-20% higher than in US national labs), they struggle to hire people who usually can make twice the money at Amazon or Microsoft. And you still need some ties to academia.
From my point of view, as a developer who didn't understand anything about the science my platform was used for:
- I think you probably want to have a few PhD students, postdocs and professors. They are the ones who can be creative given the right environment: no pressure to publish, access to sufficient resources (material and human) that enable their work.
- You need more money, but more importantly to spend it wisely. Pay people enough (in my case 20-30% more) and you'll cut the turnover by 2-3x.
We collaborated with them quite a bit by the way, and they faced almost exactly the same issues. Salaries aren't that good really (maybe 10-20% higher than in US national labs), they struggle to hire people who usually can make twice the money at Amazon or Microsoft. And you still need some ties to academia.
From my point of view, as a developer who didn't understand anything about the science my platform was used for:
- I think you probably want to have a few PhD students, postdocs and professors. They are the ones who can be creative given the right environment: no pressure to publish, access to sufficient resources (material and human) that enable their work.
- You need more money, but more importantly to spend it wisely. Pay people enough (in my case 20-30% more) and you'll cut the turnover by 2-3x.