[raptor556]

If I were to restart my career, this is likely the field I'd pursue. I read The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee last year and just became enraptured in the possibilities.

I'm wondering if there's anything I can contribute to that field as someone with general programming capabilities.

[roughly]

> I'm wondering if there's anything I can contribute to that field as someone with general programming capabilities.

Oh there Absolutely is!

In general, there are four really high impact areas for computer folks - automation of lab equipment allows for scaling the number of experiments and the data that can be gathered by orders of magnitude; data science and engineering to sort, catalog, and investigate that data; building and scaling scientific computing systems to run analysis repeatably at scale; and even standard application building to manage and improve the overall process of tracking experiments and coordinating between groups.

The scientists and bioinformatics folks are very good at what they do, but someone who really understands how to build, manage, and scale software systems is an enormous force multiplier. If you're interested in the field, I really strongly recommend it.

[hassancf]

Glorified tech support for scientists? No thanks.

[roughly]

That’s really not what the job is at this point. At least where I’ve been, there’s an understanding of the strengths of what compute systems and software can offer for accelerating the work that’s done and opening new avenues for experimentation and methods development - it’s very much a collaboration, not a one-sided tasking.

That said, you don’t get to just go off and faff around with code - you do have users and they do know more about you about the problem space you’re working in, so you do have to spend some time to learn to understand what you’re building and the context you’re operating in, which is different from most other tech jobs. The failure case for most software/computer folks coming into bio is not recognizing the difference between biology and physics before building systems.

[wruza]

Why? Do you have a bad experience?

[markus_zhang]

If I want to do data engineering for such labs, how should I aporoach or even find such opportunities? I heard they hire graduate students for that in general.

[epicureanideal]

Except somehow the required education is much higher and the pay is much worse than software, right?

I’m personally surprised we don’t have 20x as many people working in biotech.

[roughly]

There's sort of a running joke with how the market treats biotech as well - a bio company could announce they'd cured death and get a 5% bump in their stock price, whereas a tech company says the word "blockchain" and doubles their share price. As a software engineer, you can get pay into the ballpark of what you'd get elsewhere, but you should probably just ignore the "equity" section of that offer letter.

[anarticle]

The marginal and capital costs of biotech are way higher than tech. It is absolutely fascinating however.

In the research field (my old field) most things don't work!

"If it always worked, it would be business. Let's go the pub." -- me to grad student after 12h of imaging cells that took months to grow up :)

[mensetmanusman]

It’s because bioengineering does not yet result in huge capital outputs and productivity gains that other engineering fields enable abstractly.

Once that happens and the existing underemployed bio-scientists are printing money through wealth/value creation, you will get your 20x.

[volkk]

i imagine a big reason for this is that we don't have a silicon valley of biotech pumped with VC money. and presumably a big reason for that is there's all kinds of red tape when it comes to health and humans. no such thing as "disrupting" if you're going to violate some intense laws and then get arrested for it or get your labs shut down. or even worse, the potential resulting violence from fundamentalists surrounding your campus, or stalking employees. scary stuff

[roughly]

Well, even getting past the human/medical side - one thing the computer/VC people miss coming into the field is Bio is both expensive and not amenable to the kinds of growth/pricing curves computers have been. It costs money to grow a cell strain in a tube, but to grow 100 cell strains, it costs… 100x as much. It takes 24 minutes for E.coli to reproduce, but in another couple years we’ll be able to get that down to… 24 minutes. There’s opportunities for improving the cost, reducing the spend on reagents (or finding better ones), reducing the number of strains required, that kind of thing, but the computer/internet/digital industry’s basically priced a Moore’s law curve in on everything, and that just doesn’t work in Bio. The capital costs are large and the time to iterate is really slow compared to digital.

[TeMPOraL]

> no such thing as "disrupting" if you're going to violate some intense laws and then get arrested for it or get your labs shut down. or even worse, the potential resulting violence from fundamentalists surrounding your campus, or stalking employees. scary stuff

Or, you know, actually "disrupt" something, like endocrine system of half a million people, or the entire global economy.

For the past decade, "Uber for Biotech" was my go-to scary hypothetical to post in HN comments. I'm increasingly worried we may actually get one for real.

(And to be absolutely clear: I'm fine with the biotech part itself. I'm worried about the consequences of using it to frack markets, SV-style.)

[toss1]

Yup, Theranos attracted more than $700 million, was valued at $10 billion, and silently returned bogus test results for thousands of people. They weren't doing anything like altering people's DNA, immune systems, endocrine systems, etc.

Yes the barriers and regulations are (rightly) much higher than just business or consumer software, but I fully expect that the VC money will be, and in fact is already moving there. VC is very herdlike, and it'll only take a few really hot biotech hits to open the floodgates. I'd predict 5-10 years away, maximum.

[Balgair]

TBF, San Diego and Boston are the centers for Biotech. The issues you raise are the correct ones.

[asielen]

Also Oyster Point in South San Francisco (north of Silicon Valley) is a massive biotech hub.

In some way hubs are even more important in biotech than in software because of the massive startup cost.

[schnitzelstoat]

I just finished that book, it was really good. I can't wait to read The Song of the Cell.