[Declanomous]

Yeah, totally. The difference is a bioinformaticist with a PhD generally gets to choose what they research, whereas a bioinformaticist without a PhD has to work under someone else's grant. Biology actually has the lowest pay of any major for people working in their field with a four-year degree. You are lucky to make more than minimum wage with a four-year degree, especially if your interest is field ecology or something similar.

If you want to talk about a shortage of labor where it would matter, biology as a field is probably hurting way more for talented software engineers than any company that needs a data engineer. There are so many great applications for programming in biology, and unlike other sciences, say physics, researchers don't tend to pick up on any amount of programming skill on their way to their PhD.

I've tried getting involved in bioinformatics on the side, but it's really difficult to keep up with the field if you don't have thousands of dollars to drop on journal subscriptions. It's also really hard to get access to the data researchers use in general (in any field), but it is made even harder when dealing with researchers involving people due to concerns about privacy. I don't think a focus on privacy is a bad thing, but a lot of publicly available data is sanitized to the point where your sample size would need to be in the billions to draw any inferences. You can request access to less general data, but good luck doing that without the support of a research organization.

Anyways, unless you have a martyr complex, there really isn't any reason to go into bioinformatics.

[x0x0]

I happily worked in a wetlab writing stats software to support breast cancer research. I now do better ad targeting. My salary tripled.