[max-hoffman]

When I was an MD/PhD student in 2017-2018, there were only a handful of labs specializing in applied medical ML and computational biology. Since leaving to work as an ML eng/backend eng, I have been surprised by how the relationships between academics, practitioners, and investors in pure software contribute to a positively reinforcing loop. On the medicine side, the academics lean towards software skepticism, the investors make fewer and safer bets to compensate for historically lower margins/growth/return multiples compared to pure software, and the subset of practitioners get payed orders of magnitude less and have correspondingly less engineering development. The differences affect everything from managerial quality, skill and career development, location flexibility, upward mobility, product scope and impact.