If you look at current jobs such as "bioinformatics programmer", the salaries are somewhere between a biologist and a software engineer even though it requires more knowledge than either. Remember, biologists start off at around 35-50k/yr on jr. level, while SEs start at ~100k+.
Basically, it is better to be a junior level SE than a super senior bioinformatician.
The real problem with biology is the salaries don’t rise as fast you become more more senior. Biotech is certainly not the easy way to wealth.
One reason I am glad I got out of biotech.
Anyways, thanks for sharing.
It doesn't usually require more knowledge. The majority of bioinformaticians that I know are pretty poor coders, and know just enough Perl or Python to count some stuff up an do some stats on it or plot a graph. They have no idea how to set up a server, write maintanable code, design a database well or keep a website secure. Obviosuly there are exceptions, but the majority that I have worked with are junior level programmers with knowledge of biology.
I am not sure you fully appreciate what " knowledge of biology" means. As a programmer who did a lot of molecular biology in the past - doing molecular biology is not simple. The learning curve for a lot of biological topics - especially the ones that get close to organic chemistry is really steep.
Programmers underestimating the value/knowledge of accountants/lawyers.
Businessman assuming tech work is simple.
People by default assume what looks simple for someone to do must be simple - even if they spent 10,000+ hours practicing it.
A lot of bioinformatics is implementing elaborate algorithms in a memory efficient way.
Things like
- approximate string search using modified suffix trees
- some new variation of the EM algo using a new optimization strategy
- the whole protein folding field where many implement the simulations on a huge array of GPUs. Here you not only have to know how to write efficient code on GPUs, but also be an expert in parallel algorithms if the algorithm you are implementing is not embarrassingly parallel.
However, these algos will be thrown out in a month so they don't care about maintainability or uptime.