Hacker News Reader

Comment by gilesc | Hacker News Reader

I think this article is a bit sensationalist. Yes, there are niche techniques in biology, but many -- Western blots, qPCR, cell culture, transfection -- are transferable to almost any other biology lab.

The article's core advice -- make sure to acquire transferable skills -- is certainly a good idea, though.

As a bioinformatics PhD student, life is great: I get to learn those programming and math skills specifically mentioned by the article as being transferable, along with some of the other more esoteric skills. (Moral of the story: choose bioinformatics! :)

View on HN

You're right about bioinformatics/biostatistics. That's my advice to anyone that wants to major in biology and actually get a decent job out of it. You can always fall back on being a code monkey if biology doesn't pan out...

In my case, I have an BA in Biology and MS in Env. Science/Biology and that led me into software for that discipline (GIS). So, for the past 10+ years I've been a software developer but with specialized environmental knowledge.

Who wants to be a code monkey?

A postdoc without job prospects, for instance. If there's one thing less desirable than churning out Java for an insurance company, then it's being a lab monkey with no realistic chance of getting a tenure track position.

So, yes, quite a few people want to be code monkeys.

Most biostats people I know wind up doing considerably better than code monkey.

Just don't succumb to Perl.

Ha! Thankfully, Perl seems to be mostly going out of favor in bioinformatics in favor of a Python / R combo.

Why so much prejudice against Perl on Hacker News??!!

I should know, because I shared the same biased views until I had a job which required quick iterations of complicated computation of a large dataset with limited hardware. I never had really used perl before that, but when it started to save me literally weeks of work I came to love it.

There's a tool for every job.

I think I didn't like Perl before because the code looked hard to understand. But since then I found out first hand one can do shitty C or Python too.

Sorry, I just had to suffer some Perl plus Bash and Makefiles big-ball-of-mud at work. Just makes you disgruntled. (We're re-writing that piece in Haskell.)

I don't know how other Perl programs fare. Probably better. Though the syntax makes you cry. And treating things like lists of lists as an advanced topic, that's needs something special like `references'. Did I mention how functions get their parameters? The interpolation in strings can be handy, though.

And I agree about the possibility of bad code in Python and C. (I have some Python nightmare at hand, too.)

Wasn't bioinformatics even one of the early adoptors of Python in 2001/2002? I could be wrong, but I seem to remember something like that.

Well, bioinformaticians are far from uniform in terms of language usage (my mentor staunchly defends his use of VB6, for instance...), but this link shows people using Python for structural bioinformatics as early as 2001: http://mgl.scripps.edu/people/sanner/html/talks/PSB2001talk....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com