There are three major timescales to consider when you’re trying to carry out a particle physics analysis:

1. How long it takes to figure out what you want to measure or search for and how to do it.
2. How long it takes you code up the analysis.
3. How long it takes you to run your code over your data.

There’s a multiplier on 2 and 3 based on how many mistakes you make. If you make a lot of mistakes, you have to spend a long time figuring out what they are and rerunning your analysis on the data. How often you make mistakes is related to how good of a coder you are, but also how good your framework is.

Most particle physics analyses follow a fairly similar workflow. These days, reconstruction of candidate particles (of things like electrons, muons, photons, jets, and others) are produced centrally by the experiment. Then, individual analyses apply their own selection criteria to the different...