In Academia, a soft money research position is one where uncertain money comes from an external source. The employee or xyr supervisor/boss might need to secure funding every couple of years or so, in order for the position to continue. The way out would be tenure or a government job.
An obvious soft money position is the post-doctoral fellowship, but many post-docs might not find a faculty position directly. For example, if the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) advertises a soft money assistant researcher position, they have a defined path of promotion steps. UCLA defines four steps of assistant researcher (2 years max), three steps of associate researcher (2 years max), and nine steps of researcher (3 years max until step IV, possibly indefinite from step V). If coming in at step I of assistant researcher, it might, theoretically, take 4*2+3*2+4*3=26 years of positions in steps of 2 years (first 14 years) and 3 years (last 12 years), until one might be appointed indefinately, if I'm reading things correctly. Needless to say, not ideal from an employee's point of view.
Although time-limited positions and soft money might not mean exactly the same thing, I suppose they often go hand in hand. That raises the question: how common is it for researchers to spend a long time, say more than 10 years, in soft money positions? It's one thing to "drop out" of Academia when finishing a PhD at 28 years, it's another thing to move from postdoc to assistant researcher to associate researcher, only to finally discover, at age 45, that you're not good enough for tenure, and lack the necessary skills and experience for a teaching position. Oops.
In Science, Technology and Engineering (STEM) fields in the USA and Canada, how common is it for researchers to spend more than 10 years in time-limited soft-money research positions?
Answer
The way out would be tenure or a government job.
There seems to be a misconception here, namely that tenure is necessarily a way out from soft-money positions. Instead, it's possible to get a tenured soft-money position. This means the university provides no salary or other funding (which are supposed to come from grants), but they can't decide to eliminate your affiliation with the university. This is obviously not as secure as being paid by the university, but it still means something. Controversial research can't be held against you, and the department can no longer decide you don't meet their standards. (The latter is actually a genuine risk. Sometimes someone is allowed to hang around in a soft-money position for many years despite not being respected by some of the department, because nobody cares enough to try to get rid of them. Then one year a new chair comes in and decides to clean up the department by imposing higher standards.)
Most soft-money positions do not lead to any sort of tenure, and it's rare to have an "up or out" scenario in which someone must achieve tenure or leave. In particular, the scenario described in the question, in which someone pursues a soft-money position for twenty years and is then denied tenure and forced to leave, is not standard or common.
In particular, I don't think the UCLA positions the question links to are "time-limited" in any harmful way. My reading is that once you reach Researcher V or above, you can sit at that rank indefinitely. The time limits on lower levels ensure that junior researchers will get periodic raises and titles the reflect their increased experience. There is no tenure in this career track at UCLA; there is periodic review, but I'd guess that it's not particularly severe (intended to make sure people remain productive, not to weed out otherwise promising researchers). It's certainly not a career track with anything like the security or stability of a tenured position, but aside from that it looks pretty reasonable.
In Science, Technology and Engineering (STEM) fields in the USA and Canada, how common is it for researchers to spend more than 10 years in time-limited soft-money research positions?
It varies enormously between fields and departments. In medicine, soft-money positions are pretty common and they can be prestigious and relatively secure. In mathematics, very few people support themselves entirely from grants. In computer science, it's in between.
As a rule of thumb, in the U.S. long-term soft-money positions are not a route towards a tenured hard-money position. It can happen, but this is not the typical or expected outcome. Instead, they are a parallel career track. One way to gauge how common this track is at institutions you care about is to look at departmental directories and count titles like "researcher", "research associate", "research scientist", etc.
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