There aren't enough smart people in biology doing something boring

There’s probably on the order of 10 million scientists, a sizeable chunk of whom could be said to work in biology (including adjacent fields like microbiology, biochem…). The article contains only references to a handful of non-representative outliers… That’s more than a generalization, it’s a total miss.

Modulo how important AI turns out to be.

25 years ago, it seemed obvious China was going to be to the 21st century what the USA was to the 20th. But also 25 years ago, AI translation in a video call that not only dubs you in your own voice but also modifies your mouth to sync lips with the synthesised voice, was wild speculative SciFi on par with a warp drive.

  >Sometimes I feel guilty that I’m not as directly passionate about the product itself as I should be, and am more passionate about the people and company and the journey it’s on.

I for one would be happy if the everyday software I use wasn't complete rubbish. It won't make the world meaningfully better, but it certainly won't make it worse. It's a start.

* Get them to implement the kubernetes ssd/disk attachment plugin for the Adobe cloud offering.

* Get them to implement the remote access, scheduling and status control of a biochemistry centrifugue.

Both missions are boring, and neither will change much how whe world runs.

Well, I lied. Because of incentives, it is actually choosing between 15 decent engineers for the Adobe cloud or 1-2 cheap & bad engineers for the centrifugue (I have worked in embedded, I know software is an afterthought in that industry).

And now let's make it more personal: would you rather work for Adobe cloud for 135k per year, or for Centrifugues R Us for 85k per year? Would your spouse agree with your decision, especially after your 3 year old decided to grab and throw the TV to the floor?

The root issue is that people and groups are disorganized and have inconsistencies between them. Changing habits and convincing other humans and making political coalitions is very hard, so instead people are willing to spend surprisingly large amounts of money in various ways that somehow take the edge off.

Creating or adopting software to "organize" is just one way that can occur. It could also be something like a doomed initiative that someone with clout wants, or even just paying the salary of a useless person hoping they'll leave on their own because firing them is too hard.

I have a family member who works for Wells Fargo and discovered this while talking to him and a programmer friend of his. They work on the systems that move money around between accounts, and I work on a shitty half-thought-out web app. I'm paid like 2x what they are.

There are plenty of things that are important that the “market” doesn’t allocate a ton of money towards and tons of stuff that are really not important but the “market” rewards. The market in the end is a collection of decisions by individuals in aggregation, and decisions by humans are rooted more in their psychology than in some uber rational god mind of optimality. It is very possible to shape behavior, decision making, and capital allocation in ways that are demonstrably pessimal. Indeed with the advent of mass consumption of social media and algorithmic manipulation of psychology you can shape market behavior directly in ways that are detrimental to the participants in the market while rewarding the manipulators. This can be even done as a method of warfare, in which you shape psychology, behavior, and market preferences against a societies best interests.

This is why we have non market systems that prioritize objectively important work that’s inefficient by the market’s perspective. This is essentially the outcome of 248 years of economic research after the wealth of nations.

No, "the market" isn't all knowing and infallible. It's wrong very often. And the way it allocates capital is often not optimal in any way.

People like you argue that scamming old people is an important activity because it allows capital to be better employed. I mean, "the market" wouldn't reward the scammer with a living otherwise!