“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).
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.
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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).
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.