While I do find it unfortunate that software developers in research are underappreciated, I wonder if making an official title for this will really solve the problem. One issue is that if all you are doing is writing code, you could do the same thing in industry, and there's really no way academia is going to match that kind of salary.
I don't really see the issue with how it appears to work right now though? My understanding is currently if your research requires you to program, then you program it yourself, or collaborate with others. Thus, being a good coder actually helps some people publish more. At least this is what I saw with people in the more practical research topics like systems research, but even in theoretical research.
On the other hand, I suppose this is a problem for people who are not in CS. However, I imagine these people just hire programmers to do the work in the same way they might hire lab assistants. In any case, I'm not really convinced just putting a new title or career track will help.. how is this career track any different from just a normal software development track?
It seems more like the real issue is that you are hiring a postdoc when what you really want is just a software developer, but perhaps they only want to pay post doc salaries?
I actually have "research software engineer" on my resume and you're right, it doesn't do much. In fact I don't think this is uncommon, at least in the US. Myself and former colleagues indeed have no trouble working in industry positions.
However one thing to note is that many cases, research programming has specialized requirements that are rare for most industry positions and domain scientists. For example, numerical analysis to ensure stability of models, distributed computing to scale massive simulations or analytics, algorthims and visualizations to explore datasets, NLP, ML, etc. Some of these skills domain scientists develop but for the most part these are likely going to require someone with a CS background.
"However, I imagine these people just hire programmers to do the work in the same way they might hire lab assistants."
From what I know (decades ago, and from a very low-N and non-representative (biology, psychology) sample), "in the same way" = not.
The typical lab assistants are students or Ph.D. students; the researchers cannot do software engineering, so they write programs.
Things likely are different in medicine and hard physics. When people are used to spending huge sums on hardware, they tend to accept that spending money on a professional is worth it. Similarly, in the humanities, people probably are more likely to realize/accept that paying a professional is worth it.
And the career track should be different from a normal one in the sense that one has more control over what one does, how one does it and when one does it, has higher job security, and works on things that are more fun and/or more fulfilling, all at the expense of lower financial reward.
I don't really see the issue with how it appears to work right now though? My understanding is currently if your research requires you to program, then you program it yourself, or collaborate with others. Thus, being a good coder actually helps some people publish more. At least this is what I saw with people in the more practical research topics like systems research, but even in theoretical research.
On the other hand, I suppose this is a problem for people who are not in CS. However, I imagine these people just hire programmers to do the work in the same way they might hire lab assistants. In any case, I'm not really convinced just putting a new title or career track will help.. how is this career track any different from just a normal software development track?
It seems more like the real issue is that you are hiring a postdoc when what you really want is just a software developer, but perhaps they only want to pay post doc salaries?