Comment by uvesten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by uvesten | Hacker News Reader

Anecdata, but I did a master’s in bioinformatics a few years ago, and as part of that I spent about a year in a human genomics lab.

I fully agree that the software used is really bad in general, but what is worse is the level of IT literacy among the PhD’s and post-docs from the biology side. (Also statistics, I guess a lot of p-hacking is the result of authors simply being clueless…)

After finishing my thesis, I was offered to stay and work at the lab. After thinking about it, and accepting, I was told that funding wasn’t secured yet, but that it should come ”any day now”…

Thanks, but no thanks.

Anyway, I fully see the need for professional software engineers in this field, but job security and even job availability (aside from the low salaries) in academia is abysmal, so I don’t think the current situation will change any time soon.

Honestly, I think people like you are the right kind of people to start private enterprises and bring along professional software engineers to help you build something incredible in the space.

There might me an opportunity for a company to enter this space, but then again maybe not.

When everything is a mess of ad hoc Perl, Python and R scripts to solve unique one-off problems, you might well find that there isn't a sufficiently common subset of functionality that people are prepared to pay money for. That is, while the need may be there, the business case may not be. It might be that most of the field are quite content with the status quo.

It's easier and cheaper to get some poorly-trained PhD students to wrangle badly-written and poorly-maintainable scripts than it is to pay a company to provide a robust and well-written solution instead. The "indentured labour" also distorts the supporting ecosystem. [I say this after having done a PhD in biomedical science.]

I remember one of my colleagues asking me to help him getting some special software from a particular group working [for DNA methylation analysis]. They wanted paying $10K for it IIRC. It was a complete mess, wouldn't work, had not documentation, and I didn't trust it was genuinely functional it was just such a state. For a one-off, maybe $10K was worth it, but if you only have 2-3 customers worldwide who will pay, it's not a viable business if the product works perfectly, let alone if it's a fragile disaster that barely works at all.

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