"So... What happened to the last guy?"
tom_b: This is not directly related to your question, but as someone who stepped from the corporate world to the non-profit world (medical research center affiliated with university hospital), I can say the pay is lower but the freedom is greater.I'm more in charge of projects, trusted to make technical decisions and set direction, and seem to get more respect as a practitioner here.  Since I was a tech lead on a project in the big corp world, I can contrast the two similar experiences.  I'm just more autonomous here.Downsides include a lack of user trust (previous software devs here tended to be a little tougher for people to deal with and were more prone to saying 'no' to requests).  University researcher mindset is historically aimed at having software dev done directly by a research team member rather than trusting a centralized IT team.Good communication is more critical here.  Learning how to express ideas in multiple ways is much more important - I have to be able to both talk over an idea and present a visual display as well.  It is also assumed that you will understand a researcher's problem domain rather quickly, which is stressful, but fun.  You have to plan for a huge range of IT skills, from the person who can kind of use a browser to the self-taught SQL expert who I probably should just add to my team directly.