My experience was that everyone there was extremely smart, but all post-doc and top scientists in …

… My experience was that everyone there was extremely smart, but all post-doc and top scientists in their field (the team I worked on was looking for Anti-Alpha particles from gold-gold particle collisions that also helped create Quark Gluon Plasma). So I'm not sure their relative need for regular software engineers. In terms of bureaucracy, you're still working for the government. The scientists all complained about the layers of government bureaucracy but were mostly okay with it. High-tier science moves at a pretty slow pace; coming from a tech background you might not be used to the slow pace around the actual physical construction of some of these devices, let alone the fund-seeking, approvals, testing, runs, and data collection. and 33-50% is a hopeful estimate. Let's say one is a 500k a year senior/staff SWE at FAANG. at a similar level of experience, one's pay would be very lucky to break 150k. So fascinating science, layers of bureaucracy, slow moving stuff, PhD's in their fields, and reduced pay. …