I am a computer scientist. While many people wouldn't consider it a "science," (I doubt it most of the time, theoretical CS, IMNSHO, is just applied math) I help a lot of fundamental basic sciences (non-CS) research.

My specialization is high performance (supercomputers) computing and scientific visualization and analysis. This translates to helping scientists run simulations, large-scale data wrangling, and helping to analyze scientific and simulation data. I'm more on the application side, rather than hardware side. So, I act as a facilitator to the domain scientists and the guys building the supercomputers, because I talk both "languages," or at least I try to.

I do like it, and as I mentioned before, the only part that isn't fun is writing papers (but that needs to be done so others can see your research) and getting funding. I'm not completely all "soft money," so I do have some stable money that I can rely on. Also, I'm currently overfunded, so I am doing just fine in terms of paying myself.

I tend to agree with most other scientists that there isn't enough funding. There are scientists at my lab that are unfunded and go onto overhead.

Though, I'm not sure the solution is to guarantee funding for everybody. There's an incentive to do well on each soft money research project to show that you are competent and can successfully complete the next research grant. So, I speculate that we might not be as productive, but that's probably wrong.

More likely, I would be just as productive with steady funding and it would be beneficial to the whole society to guarantee funding for research, rather than having to constantly sing for your dinner. So much research time is spent just looking for the next dollar. Most people like being useful or productive, even if funding was guaranteed, and there would likely be more scientists if research funding was steady.