| I'm hoping so. I got a MS degree in Bioinformatics and for the past three years the only role it has served is collecting dust in my closet upstairs :) I was the young bioinformatician in 2006 and when working in a lab it felt very isolating. The PI and Postdocs just had me solve simple computational problems (or even IT problems). It felt very much like I was a cog in their grant writing machine rather than a collaborator that deserved any kind of authorship in a publication. And looking back there was no one to teach me about good practices of writing software like source control, SOLID, testing, etc. Or even storage of our microarrays. I eventually went to work for a biotech consultancy but I discovered that biotech software was a gimmick used to hike up the prices on software. Sure it was a niche field but we would charge clients hundreds of thousands of dollars for software that was barely functional. I think a lot of Research groups were badly burned by this and eventually started trying to do everything in house. I eventually became disillusioned/burned out and left the field entirely. I've been out of the field for four years now but still feel badly as I felt I've wasted my training. I still have a retainer client as a way back 'in' back into bioinformatics. It would be nice to find these 'bioinformatics groups' and see how they're successfully collaborating with other labs/research groups. |