Really glad to see this, but it reminds me of the earlier HN post that said engineers don't go into genomics because it doesn't pay and requires a lot of investment in learning biology.
^Most recent discussion I’ve seen.
I worked in genomics, left this year because you’re underpaid and often disregarded “IT-help” that assists wildly over-educated and underpaid people driving the actual research in 95% of cases.
Work is no more meaningful than anywhere else. It’s a big “selling point” for the industry, but it’s just a way to get people to get paid less (yay you’re making the world better than all those garbage people serving coffee or healing sick people or keeping your lights on or optimizing the routes of the goods you have delivered). If you want sustainable systems, trying to be a martyr and work for less only screws this up long term.
Code-base is not open-source. It’s biotech R&D, there is zero culture of sharing outside your organization within industry. You can present high-level things at conferences and such, but you’ll have to rip the raw data out of their dead hands…not happening.
I’ve been in too many conversations about building software to serve larger groups in this industry. It can happen, but it can’t currently and nobody wants it. Confident someone will find a solution, but everyone wants their own home-grown solutions in their own walled-gardens that no one has access to.
Data and the things it can/can’t tell you are held tightly in these companies. I was at a pharma a couple years ago where researchers were explicitly told they COULD NOT test certain compounds in a certain way because they did not want a trace of this data to exist while they were trying to push compounds through the FDA.
[1] – https://dantelabs.com/
at best you waste your time, at worst you will find all kinds of things that are not there
it is the Silicon Valley hacker mentality that thinks the life is some sort of computer where you can fiddle with parameters
learn some biology first, then you can marvel at it and realize just how absurdly simplistic is to think you can read anything out of some random letter
I wanted to play around with BAM files and it is much more engaging to play around with my own BAM file versus downloading one from a website.
It is also about data ownership. The value of a fully sequenced genome is limited, sure, but I still want that value without having to give my genomic data to 23andMe.
But Dante labs sure will!
But it's a fun subject, and as the technology develops, middle layers will disappear and then the money from expertise will become better.
The number of people that are both capable software developers and has a good understanding of cellular biology are quite few and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future.
In biotech, the end goal is a physical product or a service performed by a doctor or another highly paid professional. Those don't scale as well as software. The ratio of users to developers is also low. You are likely developing software for many niche tasks, which does not scale either.
And if you are considering roles in the academia, your productivity is not going to be high enough to justify a competitive salary. Productivity, in monetary terms, is defined by the amount of money you can bring in. Either directly on indirectly. In the academia, that usually means grants. You may be able to argue successfully to a funding agency that one software engineer is worth two postdocs, but not four.
I got a real imposter syndrome from the whole project and my housemate went on to be a famous microscopist (but later rage-quit to leave for industry). I build microscopes using 3d printers and other easily sourced bits. But Home Depot is a terrible place to source materials. They are the lowest quality.
A quick trip to Lowe’s to get PVC fittings and pipes, and I suddenly made my own scientific equipment and saved me some time!
Then there are also engineers from XKCD 1831 https://xkcd.com/1831