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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

20 years ago I got interested in "bioinformatics." I loved learning something about molecular biology, after all those years of hearing about DNA and not understanding it. And "Molecular Biology of the Cell" is, hands down, the greatest textbook ever written.

That said: a lot of the comments are spot on. You're working in a field where the hard scientists and business people rule and you're a helper. Maybe they're grateful for your help OR maybe they regard you as an overpaid lab assistant. After all, they have PhD's and postdocs, and you don't.

I've never actually worked in that field. I'd guess that it might be very satisfying, despite the low pay. Or not.

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I have worked in a genomics lab after finishing a bioinformatics master's.

It was my first fulltime job, and by far the most chill. People were great. The PI was laid back, the whole lab went out for beers every now and then - and not because of a mandatory startup-style 'bonding' event. We genuinely enjoyed each others company and hung out outside of work. I never had that in any other job, which were/are all commercial operations.

The vibe and the power structure felt very different. More level. There werent any purely managerial roles, everyone was doing at least a bit of 'science'. And even junior ICs like me got to coach undergrads every now and then. Most of the operational budget comes from grants, on which you have to deliver. The pay is not amazing, so most employees really are in it for the science.

Or I was still young and naive and was lucky all of the two layers of management were all nice people.

Ultimately I left, as the grant money coudnt keep up with offers I was getting.

It is still the job I am most proud of. I love talking about it, and it really sucks that even a well funded lab cant really afford market engineering rates.

I'm in a role that is very similar (different field though). However, I know enough about academia to know that alot depends on the culture the PI fosters. Also, I spend a lot of time learning the field.

I wish more fields would just start adopting the product/engineer partnership that Software companies have perfected. Engineers are very good at what they do. Product people are very good at what they do. They need each other to build things. Sure, engineers might know enough about product to get by and product people might know enough about coding to get by, but the reason it works is because each one is an expert in what they do and are equal.

Its no different in finance, healthcare, genomics etc. I'd love to work in a setting where I'm paired with an SME product manager in a domain I have no clue about and they respect my work and I respect theirs and we are partners.

This is one of the biggest factors that made software/internet companies explode. They respected people who build software. They didn't need to. A bunch of MBAs could have easily just decided that the best way to run the company was to treat the people building the product as a cost center. Many did. I think that's probably one of the reason for the lack of innovation and down fall in many old tech companies like HP/IBM.

The ones that treated SWEs properly and valued them accordingly, did very well.

I have heard from a friend who's a doctor that in hospitals there's a very adversarial relationship between doctors and MBAs. The MBAs see the doctors as a cost center, and the doctors resent people without MDs being above them.

Your comment reminds me to be thankful that at many software companies engineering, product, and design do respect each other as equal partners. I totally agree that to do otherwise is business suicide.

to very opposing philosopies:

MD's -> patient interest comes first

MBA's -> company interest comes first

Having worked (as a consultant/contractor) for a few businesses in the field, I can say that my experience was closer to "grateful for your help" than to "an overpaid lab assistant". I even recall once, in a meeting, being referred to (by a senior staff scientist with a Ph.D.) as "the technical guy", causing me to wonder at how someone who does gene sequencing thinks of programming as being more technical.

But, YMMV.

> causing me to wonder at how someone who does gene sequencing thinks of programming as being more technical

Everything you don't understand looks complicated from the outside.

Molecular Biology of the Cell got me extremely excited about genetics and bioinformatics, highly, highly recommend this book to any software person I meet who is interested in biology.

As to the work environment, it seems to be extremely varied depending on the lab and team your on. I came from a number of years doing web development in marketing and finance before joining an R1 university research lab, and in many ways the day-to-day is quite similar in both fields. You are not the 'go-to' person for most things, but with that said, even as an individual contributor I feel my voice is heard on technical decisions where appropriate. As for pay, it's the biggest aspect that will make me leave at some point. If you do not have a PhD, or even a degree in my case, you can't expect to get paid a lot. As to the speculation on the satisfaction of the work, it is indeed deeply satisfying!

I got to have a conversation with one of the hero donors that gave a kidney biopsy after a life-saving transplant. It's hard to overstate just how impactful your work feels when talking to someone like that. Even as a small cog in the larger machine (our lab is around 50 strong with many people being at the top of their sub-fields), the end results of the effort will be massive improvements in individuals quality of life, this alone makes it quite easy to get out of bed in the morning.

Any particular edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell you’d recommend? I just looked up the 7th edition on Amazon (seems like the latest) and it’s $300 USD. Oof.

I'm on #3.

An awful lot has changed since 2000. RNA is now a Thing, where it was just a poor stepchild before. Protein folding, of course.

But yeah. The pictures are shining examples of what a scientific diagram can be.

I've still got my 3rd edition copy (from 1999 when I was an undergrad molecular biologist). Most of the basic biochemistry and molecular biology will be exactly the same--it hasn't changed much if at all. While there have been lots of additional details added over the last two decades, the fundamentals are unchanged for the most part.

This wouldn't apply to other fields such as Immunology (Janeway's Immunobiology) where I have purchased multiple copies of the years due to the field changing so fast.

Go on ebay and by the "international" edition

What level of chemistry do you need to know in order to benefit from reading the text?

> That said: a lot of the comments are spot on. You're working in a field where the hard scientists and business people rule and you're a helper

This definitely was the culture when I started working in the field 6 years ago. However, the culture has shifted (at least where I work) to where biologists and engineers are equal partners that work together on solving these problems. For those organizations that are not this way, I think they’re going to have to change if they want to innovate.

Agreed. Huge change over the last 10-15 years. My first job in the space had a view that obviously a mere software developer wouldn't be paid more than even a postdoc scientist. And as postdocs weren't paid all that well, you see where this is going.

These days more biotech companies are computationally/software focused. They understand that to pull in strong talent they're not operating in the same academic science world.

That may be the case for engineers with PhDs and scientific credentials, but I'm not so sure that is true of normal developers who did not play the academic game. I'm not going to take a job based on the eventuality of a culture shift, and I don't think you should either.

This isn't just genomics, by the way. Scientific computing folks are very similar.

That's always been my impression, but it does sound like "software eats the world" has had some effect. At least in some places.

Looking at it from their point of view: CS people tend to think that "everything is just information, and now that we're here you're all going to be working for us."

You can see why a PhD in mol bio would resent that. Everything is not just information.

I worked in the field. Leaving to work on ads immediately tripled my salary, and gave me more room to grow.

Everyone who says you're the hired help and treated about as well as a secretary that the organization dislikes is dead on. At best, you're viewed as an overpaid cost center.

Which is sad, because I'd love to work in these areas... but I'm not giving up 66% to 75% of my income to as charity to private corporations.

>Molecular Biology of the Cell

Tangential, but what are the chemistry prereqs to grasp this book?

Fwiw, I studied humanities, do a lot of pop science reading in my spare time, and I'm able to appreciate it. There are more detailed and technical sections I skim or skip, but the overviews are fantastic. Incredible description of, for example, the sheer wonder we should all experience at the fact that all life starts as a single cell.

MBC is readable by someone with an undergraduate background in science. You'd probably want basic knowledge of biology, general chemistry and organic chemistry.

It's essentially an upper-level undergraduate textbook.

I did get a book or two out of the library, plus I had Chem 101 in college, but really, not very much.

Probably just a college level gen chem class. Pretty accessible, albeit technical, textbook from what I remember of reading it for a course a few years ago.

The chemistry requirements are minimal. You should understand the difference between ionic and covalent bonds, how van der Waals forces work, hydrophobicity, solubility, and the effects of catalysts on reaction transition states. It will also be important to understand what reaction kinetics are and what pH means. An understanding of buffers might be useful.

I would argue that, to understand the book, you specifically don't need to know electrochemistry, organic chemistry, analytical chemistry, organometallics, spectroscopy, or even physical chemistry.

Is it feasible to do any meaningful work in this field without joining a team? (e.g. as a solo hobbyist/entrepreneur)

If you have a software background and can get some basic domain knowledge, there's lots of open source projects that could use your contribution.

Doing fundamental reseach is a taller order. But lots of software, tools, pipelines etc need maintainers, optimizations...

Which projects? That seems like a good place to start.

I contribute to Nextflow core (https://nf-co.re/) It's more of a collection of pipelines than traditional software, but there are users all around the world and a good community.

Most of the packages on bioconda (https://bioconda.github.io/) are open source. But you probably want to find a sub-field that interests you most before finding a project.

In grad school, we also had an ex-google software engineer volunteer with us one day a week. It was very impactful for many members of the lab to learn good engineering practices, and it wasn't at all like the sentiment others in this thread are expressing where engineers were "janitors".

https://github.com/scverse But this is mostly about transriptomics (RNA), not genomics.

Difficult but possible. For example, Robert Edgar [1] works alone and is one of the most productive developers in this field.

[1] http://drive5.com

I worked with Bob some ~20 years ago at Berkeley. he showed up one day to check out the seminars and see if he could "help out" after having sold his database company to Intel. he said he'd been trained as a physics guy in the 80s but there were no real jobs so he started a software company instead. He joined my advisor's group (it helped a lot, because at the time most journals wouldn't publish a paper submitted from a home address).

He proceeded to completely understand hidden markov models and protein sequence alignment and was immediately hacking improvements to HMMER. However, Sean Eddy couldn't understand his optimizations (Sean has to know how HMMER works at all times) and so Bob went off and made his own tools like MUSCLE.

One of the reasons he can do this is, well, he's a programmer/math genius, and the other reason is that HMMs and protein alignments are a fairly well understood and programmable thing these days.

Still blows me away we train up all these people to be scientists when there are no jobs for them in that role.

I don't work in this space anymore, but just want to say kseq (and the rest of klib) is such an awesome time saver. Thank you.

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