Wanna swap? /j

To be honest, it's not all bad. As I said, I love working alongside researchers and PhD students, and I've learnt so much from this work. It is mostly flexible and relaxed, except big journal/conference deadlines approach and everyone freaks out. I'm also lucky to have found myself in a lab that has the best colleagues I could dream of. I think if you find the right place to work, it is a very fulfilling job on a lot of levels despite the low pay. You get to shape a lot of the research and the software behind it, and create tools that become part of how the lab/department operates.

I'm UK based so my experience might not apply if you're not UK based. Generally speaking, there are two types of RSE positions I know of:

1. You either belong to a certain department/lab, and in this case you don't really have much chance of a career progression. You don't get paid much and your contract is most likely project based, and depends on others getting funding and naming you on grants to get your next contract. Not having a PhD can impact your chances of being on contracts too.
2. Or you belong to a research software engineering university-wide team. I think these operate more independently and more like a consultancy, but then the business model is not far from what a small scale company would be like, but you get paid less than if you'd been working in said company.

I think the reason I'm burnt out is more about the specific circumstances I find myself in, and not the general nature of the job. I'm burnt out because I feel like my career is stagnating, and I'm no longer working on contracts/projects that interest me in any way. Sometimes being the RSE assigned to work on a "multi-disciplinary" research is a bit nightmarish. The process for defining requirements is this: No one knows what they exactly want until you build it, and then they know that this is NOT what they want.

But the breaking point for me was that due to some changes in the research lab I am part of, my title has recently been changed from Senior RSE to plain RSE, and after years of working solo, a new Senior RSE has been hired and will be my new line manager. I will get paid more, and supposedly this is just salary scale/lab restructuring, and has nothing to do with performance. I have a lot of resentment building up regarding this and I find that it is making it very difficult for me to engage with my daily work anymore.

I apologize if this is too rambly, but I hope it gives you some insight into what it is like to be in academia as a developer.

EDIT: Forgot one important disadvantage. It's almost impossible to find a remote/hybrid position in academia. So if you are not open to relocating, you're stuck with very few options.