[insightcheck]

> “You give up salary for huge amounts of autonomy.”

I heard otherwise from a staff scientist at a university in biological sciences, though I’m not sure how representative his view is. He said that non-professors lack research autonomy, and even then, there are limitations of what one can fund due to grants (though I’m not sure how accurate this is, as I used to assume that academic grants generally had fairly flexible conditions for using the funding).

[ProjectArcturis]

This is all accurate. There is flexibility in funding, but if you use your grant money for a completely different project than you proposed, you better hit an absolute home run or you won't get any more grants.