[caddemon]

Don't grants still tie you to government pay structures? I know in biology most academic research labs may as well be government entities because that's the main way to get funding, and that funding has various rules attached including e.g. the max pay for a postdoc.

[navbaker]

No, we don’t get funding through grants. Our work is either direct sponsored work or internal research funded through overhead. We aren’t a federally funded R&D center like Laurence Livermore or MIT Lincoln Labs, we are a university affiliated research center.

We exist in this nice middle ground between academia and pure profit companies where we do a bunch of research and exploratory work without the pressures of trying to get tenure, while also getting to push real products out to our sponsors but without ever worrying about getting laid off because we didn’t meet some growth number for the quarter.