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Be in a field where tech is the limit
- whateveracct 5y agoi think going in a field where they'll pay you plenty without noticing you barely spend time working is the play the brightest don't spend their time & energy making others wealthy
- nicbou 5y agoThat also has its disadvantages. Being stuck in an office with little work, but little else in the way of entertainment slowly burns you out. Having next to no work for two months wasn't as pleasant as I thought it would be. Fields where you don't make other people wealthy aren't so rosy either. They bring their own drama to the table.
- whateveracct 5y agoThe trick there is to work remotely. You can just build software, make art, do your own side-business 8hrs/day while hitting the employer's bar of "I'll keep paying this guy" and keep that income flowing.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoI would like to see a government sponsored campaign on the benefits of working at home. I feel like most employers are counting the seconds until they can bring us back in? "You can All come back to the office! I bet you have been waiting for this? Marg had a baby over Covid? We increased the lux rat of our office lighting--yea! Jerry Suckup made assistant to the assistant manager, but this is on a probationary basis. Gas up the jalopy, and come in! Oh yea, we have a new facial recognition system instead of a punch clock. Those kooky tech guys?" The benifits I see: 1. No commute. (Getting cars off the road is good for global warming?) And my sanity when I do need to go somewhere. 2. More sleep. 3. Less busy work to keep some middle manager happy. 4. Happier employee. 5. I have no clue over productivity. negatives: 1. I guess schmoozing is important for some people. I did make most of my younger self's friends at work because we were both at the same lousy job? 2. Some people find office banter comradery important for their mental health? I used to be one of those people, but would happily give up a little socialization for more sleep, and less hrs driving. If the government spent some tax money on a campaign to keep workers home, if the job was doable at home, I would be behind it. I wouldn't even mind if they gave credits to employers who didn't drag their employees into a office. Frame the promotion over Global Warming, and not employee satisfaction. We all know employees are way down on the list of what they care about, but a tax credit, and some kind of carbon rebate whatnot might keep many of us home? And less cars on the road. In my county, it seemed like everyone went out and bought a second car. Traffic is back to unbearable in the Bay Area.
- Negitivefrags 5y agoAnd you have zero moral qualms about this behavior at all?
- whateveracct 5y agoWhy would I? I'm employed at-will. I'm good with the arrangement. My employer is too. Win-win.
- Negitivefrags 5y agoI wonder how your employer would feel if they saw the post I replied to? If you think they would react negatively, then wouldn’t you concede that there is an element of dishonesty here?
- whateveracct 5y agoI am employed at-will and I have yearly written proof that my employer is happy with my work.
- nicbou 5y agoIf you produce [salary]$ worth of value, then it does not really matter how you produce it, right? I'm not GP, and I'm self-employed, but I think it's fair to compensate people based on the value they create, and not how much time they spend at the office. If a guy gets his work done in half the time, and his employer is happy with the cost, then everyone gets what they want.
- 55555 5y agoYou are proving the conservative belief in welfare queens.
- whateveracct 5y agoWhat welfare? I'm employed at-will and my performance is reviewed yearly.
- 55555 5y agoYou're on bigcorp welfare and you do as little work as required to not lose your benefits.
- whateveracct 5y agoI am employed at-will and I have yearly written proof that my employer is happy with my work.
- thedevilslawyer 5y agoPerhaps another way to look at this: on your tombstone it reads They had written proof that their employer was happy with their work.
- whateveracct 5y agoMy commercial software development career will hopefully not even be a footnote on my tombstone of all things :)
- nicbou 5y agoCompanies pay as little as required not to lose employees or break laws. Work is a transaction, and it looks like both that person and their employer are satisfied with the arrangement.
- 5y ago
- rawtxapp 5y agoUse your free time to build stuff, save the money to bootstrap and when your project gains traction, leave and build your own things so that you're not making someone else wealthy. The brightest absolutely do spend their time and energy making others wealthy (ex: I would consider most senior eng at FAANG to be bright and although they are definitely rich, they are not wealthy). I suspect that's because of the cycle of responsibilities and spending most of their incomes.
- whateveracct 5y agoThe thing about FAANGs and BigCos is they have more money than they know how to spend. The majority of that headcount spend is just to capture "talent" so others don't have it. I've seen millions of dollars-worth of software development waste as FAANG and BigCo. Nobody bats at eye. Because it's a bizarro world with no consequences. All you gotta do is not get wrapped up in it and collect checks ;)
- hinkley 5y ago> The majority of that headcount spend is just to capture "talent" so others don't have it. I think people on both sides forget this. You don’t need 300 engineers to solve very many problems, but if you use 300 it means 2 other companies don’t solve it too. And just because you’re making a ton of money working for a big company, doesn’t mean that what you’re doing is that important. It might just be to humor you. Even at small places, sometimes the established players get thrown a bone, working on something frivolous because it makes them happy, so they stick around.
- beambot 5y agoOr different people just have different value functions, and many of them don't care about "wealth maximization" when they're already comfortably in the 1%...
- rawtxapp 5y agoFor sure, everybody has different goals in life, but the thing is they are creating wealth, just not for themselves is all.
- globular-toast 5y agoI did that for a year or so in finance. Realised I was wasting my one life. I want to be useful.
- whateveracct 5y agoYou can be paid by the company while being useful for yourself :)
- globular-toast 5y agoI despise leeches, though. If I'm going to be here I'm going to be useful, not leech other people's hard work for my own pleasure.
- wcerfgba 5y agoI am interested to learn about fields where software engineers can help to bring about innovation and push those fields forward, providing some of the tech that is missing there. I would like to apply my skills in a transdisciplinary manner and work on projects that are not just B2B SaaS products. One option is research software engineering, where SWEs team up with researchers to produce better code for models and simulations. Are there any research fields where synthesis of domain knowledge, programming skills, and computational thinking could bring great benefits?
- amelius 5y agoYou could become a scientific programmer.
- wcerfgba 5y agoIs a scientific programmer similar to a research software engineer (RSE)?
- fancyfish 5y agoYeah, RSE is probably the term you’ll see in job ads
- the_only_law 5y agoFwiw, a vast majority of “scientific programmer” roles I’ve seen are more so looking for a “Scientist who can program”.
- rawtxapp 5y agoBiotech is one, we are still nowhere near close to understanding the secrets of the human body, there remains lots of incurable conditions, etc. I think the speed at which they were able to develop mrna vaccines just shows how far along we've come, but also how much more we have to go. Things like protein folding at deepmind definitely requires all these things you mention.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoThe sentiment is only half right. The important part is “and there is promising tech on the horizon” I think trying to get a startup based on space travel at relativistic fields would be pretty difficult. Steve Jobs was a master of this. Seeing promising tech trends that were just about ready, and putting them together at just the right time to make innovations that were world changing.
- Taek 5y agoWhy is there no innovation in healthcare? Because better technology won't get the entrepreneur a satisfying reward.
- Gravityloss 5y agoLots of innovation but things like clinical trials are very expensive. How could we get safe medical progress with less expenses?
- pgt 5y agoRegulation has a way of keeping out innovative founders who would rather add value in newer, unregulated fields.
- rawtxapp 5y agoVery costly and lots of regulations, big consequences for failing. If a SaaS product has a bug, worst case scenario, someone loses money, if someone messes up in healthcare, a person might die.
- d3ntb3ev1l 5y agoBecause you can literally make millions of more guaranteed dollars if you just go work at Facebook or Google in easier problems serving ads.
- rdtwo 5y agoNo reason to innovate insurance pays the same regardless
- rileymat2 5y agoThere must be some innovation in healthcare, we were delivered a safe effective vaccine to a new virus in about a year.
- nhumrich 5y agoWe also had the entire worlds resources to do it.
- deleted 5y ago
- mLuby 5y agoBeing in a field (or startup) where tech is not the limit is super frustrating.
- username90 5y agoSome hates being a commodity, others hates not being a commodity. Plenty of people love those boring jobs since they are easy to perform, you know what you have to do and you know you can do it. And since you are just a cog in a big machine nobody has their eyes on you since you aren't special in any way, if you quit they can go out and hire another one like you right now.
- patcon 5y agoThis also applies so hard to grassroots community organizing. They are doing all their scaling purely through manual human strategies. Which is great, but even small amounts of tooling can help these groups to organize better and avoid burnout -- burnout and frustration kills movements, because good-feels and passion is pretty much the only thing holding people together (never money, like in a regular field)
- ArtWomb 5y ago"Software is simply the encoding of human thought, and as such has an almost unbounded design space" https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1385928617943838721 https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1385928617943838721
- theodric 5y agoThis reminds me of Harry Mulisch congratulating authors for being very, very smart in _De ontdekking van de hemel_
- sho_hn 5y agoI don't know the context of the quote, but I don't think it's necessarily elitist. I have a lot of non-programmer friends who sometimes say that programming must be very dry and boring. My shiny go-to example to convince them otherwise is a nice desktop planetarium app, which you can't develop without first learning how the solar system works. Once you do you can write that down in code - an executable, computing form of knowledge, a living document that allows you to tinker, refine, share, reproduce. Software truly is pretty neat as a human societal tool with a wide range of applications. It should be for everyone. The other thing I tell them: If you've ever been in bed in the morning and planned out your steps for how to get that cup of coffee you need, designing an efficient bed-to-coffee algorithm, you've already been a a programmer.
- ojbyrne 5y agoSo presumably cdixon writes software for a living...
- N1H1L 5y agoOf course not. He pontificates. Also tangential: I find Balaji completely insufferable. His Twitter feed almost looks like that of a cult leader than of a CTO.
- nitrogen 5y agoTwitter says "This is not available to you." Was this deleted, or does Twitter just not let the public see anything at all anymore?
- tobr 5y agoI’m not convinced by this - “Innovation happens in fields where our ideas are limited by our means to pursue them” - but it’s written as if it’s self-evident. Why would it be like this and what is the argument that it is? By what measure is computing stagnant today compared to the 60’s, for example?
- z3ncyberpunk 5y agoBecause the largest industries are adtech and a million and one companies cranking out useless apps? technological innovation in the computing space is been stagnant for 10 years almost. what was once AI has just been co-opted by marketing types and redefined to mean machine learning, which is glorified brute force pattern recognition. we stifled innovation and I've been going on a trend of bloated uselessness for quite a while.
- Frost1x 5y agoI think it's almost a tautology: Innovation happens where... innovation needs to happen. Which I think is fair. Innovation does also occur where it doesn't necessarily need to.
- d3ntb3ev1l 5y agoI worked in bio tech for 4 years. Amazing people and problems. Worst pay, top heavy salaries. When a phd makes 80k a year and a “ML/AI” data scientist is lucky to make 100k you won’t find any progress like software They need to cut the top heavy executive bloat, respect the mid tier with better pay
- sho_hn 5y agoI'm always curious when I hear HN opine on salary levels. Now I understand that in SF / at certain FAANG locations you can expect to make far in excess of 80-100k, and that exerts a competitive pressure in the job market - while also being balanced to some extend by extreme CoL. But I always wonder just how small that bubble is and what the trade-offs really are. In essentially all of Central Europe except perhaps, say, Zurich, 80k-110k is a highly-salaried engineer (and affords an upper-middleclass lifestyle with good healthcare, pension, free college education, etc.), and I understand also in many areas of the US that are just fine to live in. It just sounds like completely different systems / way to run the numbers to me, not at all apples to apples.
- giantg2 5y ago$80k-100k would afford a great lifestyle in much of the US, geographically speaking. The problem is that those jobs are concentrated in areas with a higher COL. We also have to pay for things like medical insurance in the US. I know software salaries are lower in the EU (in general), I assume it's the same for biotech too.
- plandis 5y agoEven with the higher cost of living in SF/NYC/Seattle, tech pay at FAANG is pretty high. Senior software positions are pretty much start at $300k/yr across all of those companies. Plus these companies generally have excellent healthcare plans and good vacation policies. At those income levels pretty much the only thing you’re really priced out of are nice single family homes, but I suspect that’s the same in Zurich.
- 5y ago
- frazbin 5y ago> Innovation happens in fields where our ideas are limited by our means to pursue them. Software is no longer such a field, our brightest minds should be going elsewhere. As a relative dummy, I guess I'll remain in software.
- JanNash 5y agoSame.
- gilbetron 5y agoWhat a horrible article - the tech startup world is booming and ML, amongst other things, will create vast opportunities. This is the same drek I heard back in the early 2000s after the dot com bust. Literally heard people say, "I think all the great ideas in tech have already happened." Most of the time when someone is saying something that amounts to "I can't imagine what else we could make", it's a failure of their imagination that's the problem.
- giantg2 5y agoI've always loved science. I wish I could switch to biotech, but that would mean basically starting over.
- the_only_law 5y agoI'm beginning the process of starting over, not in biotech, but a different scientific/engineering field. I will inevitably earn less than I could in the long run, but from my early research it likely won't be too bad. Worst case I figure I can manage to run back to software. The caveat ofc, is that I'm still young with no ties.
- sheer_audacity 5y agoSigh. Speaking as someone who has spent the last six years of their career working on advanced physics in various technology sectors (including biotech) and then trying to make various 2D-xene materials work for semiconductors, I’ll tell you one thing: They pay you shit and if you think you’re all treated badly in FAANG, hoooboy, at least nobody has nearly caused deaths in the lab through negligence!
- sjs7007 5y ago> if you think you're all treated badly in FAANG No one thinks that. Workload at some places maybe a little on the higher side but still on average monetary and toll on life wise FAANG is probably one of the best jobs.
- giantg2 5y agoDo you want to know the real "problem"? It takes a long time to develop biotech, test it, approve it, market it, and make money. There is also a limited market (ie the people sick with that condition, specifically in rich countries). The reason tech companies make money, grow/iterate, pay more, is because they are in a field that does not require the same oversight and moral safety obligations (maybe they should to an extent) as well as being marketable to basically everyone in rich countries.
- XorNot 5y agoThis also is pretty much why finance pays well: the correlation of employee salary to company profit is as direct as it will ever be.
- giantg2 5y agoTrue, but not just direct, it's comparatively instant. You might spend years or even a decade bringing a medication or medical device to market, but you can create many types of software in months, or see a return on investments in a short time too.
- guhcampos 5y agoWife is a PhD Animal Geneticist, but works as government inspector on slaughterhouses. Makes 3-4 times the money her research colleagues do. I'm not even sure what to think of it, honestly.
- amackera 5y agoIn every way I think about it, this difference in salary seems justified. I can't imagine inspecting slaughterhouses is very fun or rewarding, but it's super important for society.
- the_only_law 5y ago> I can't imagine inspecting slaughterhouses is very fun or rewarding, but it's super important for society. But I can think of all sorts of jobs that are more important to society than working on some random doomed-to-fail SaaS that won't pay remotely near that.
- lumost 5y agoresearch is a sporadic discipline. A top tier researcher working on a choice problem with relatively predictable returns ( or at least the perception of predictability ) will make substantially more than someone working on a problem of debatable business value or with lower odds of success. In the case of research positions, the funding situation has oversaturated the market in most entry level positions - turning negotiation and career advancement into a trial by fire.
- 2bitencryption 5y ago> Biotechnology sounds to me much like computing in the 60’s. One thing I've always wondered about biotech... I imagine there are many non-obvious correlations and interactions in medicine, which would be easily detected using nothing more advanced than Excel-spreadsheet level data analysis. Making up an example: people with a certain DNA trait/allele who also have a diet with a high amount of XYZ tend to not develop disease ABC as frequently as most people. Even if we don't know the pharmacological reason why that is, it would still massively benefit lots of people, right? So it always seems to me like tech from 2007 was ready to tackle this problem. Dump in a bunch of anonymized data, find correlations, repeat. But I feel like I never hear anything about this type of work. Is it happening, but not publicized much? Is it actually not as simple as it sounds? Does nature simply not work in this way? Even if 95% of diseases are just "bad luck", I assume that other 5% is made up of environmental factors we don't yet understand, but could easily learn using well-known data processing techniques?
- ftruzzi 5y agoI've found myself thinking the same. Maybe researchers don't have the data and/or the platform? Not sure who records what they eat, and if they do they don't share it?
- asdff 5y agoThis work has infact been happening for decades. You are right that a lot of bioinformatics is analysis of tabular data using statistical models.
- roadnottaken 5y agoThis has been going on for decades, it's called GWAS [1] and it has had a few successes but basically hasn't worked as well as everyone hoped it would in the 90s. The reason it doesn't work that well is that the human genome has ~3 billion letters and human physiology is complex. So trying to establish stastitically significant correlations between genome variations and human physiology is hard and requires more than Excel. In fact, the computational tools that have been applied to this are incredibly sophisticated and are not the limiting factor. The limiting factor is that you probably need millions or billions of genomes to make it work, and we don't have that yet. Also people are beginning to realize that many disease-relevant traits are caused by rare variants (rather than obvious statistically significant correlations) which are quite hard to detect this way. So... anyway you're right that this is a natural way to approach the question of understanding the genetic basis of disease and physiology. But it's been beaten to death and found to drive fewer insights than were hoped [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study
- kemiller 5y agoI think he's got it exactly wrong — the reason we have seen a lot of "non-tech tech" companies is that software still fundamentally kinda sucks. We have become so used to it we don't always notice, but software is a fragile nightmare to work with. It's like trying to build skyscrapers with tinkertoys, and it's a miracle we can do as much as we do. Software needs a leap; AI/ML might be the start of it, not sure yet.
- ausbah 5y agowhy does it fundamentally suck? anything specific in mind?
- ForHackernews 5y agoEver used Kuberenetes? Hope you like writing yaml. Ever written Javascript? Good luck doing real maths with only floats. Ever used Electron? Hope you didn't need that 8 GB of RAM. I could go on, but most mainstream software is one step above absolute garbage. There are isolated islands of extremely high quality tools, but they tend to be esoteric FLOSS packages that are isolated from market pressures. OpenBSD is a work of art.
- rablackburn 5y agoNot the poster you were replying to, but I’ve come to the same conclusion and here’s my not-particularly-rigorous reasoning: It seems to be equal parts users stuck in a local maxima of computing skill and how that enables lax software engineering standards. When’s the last time you’ve sat down with a user who isn’t remotely interested in tech and watch them work/use a computer? Most of the population’s mental model of a computer is starkly different to the average hacker news reader. You can still hear the same complaints about how computers “don’t do what i want it to do” that i remember my parents generation saying, and they were experiencing the first waves of computerisation in their offices. The story became that the older generation just couldn’t understand the new generation, but kids are amazing with computers because they’re growing up with them. Well, some of those kids are just as hopeless. It’s partly an education problem (hard to learn computing from a teacher who doesn’t understand it themselves), and partly because UI design trended to simplifying everything as much as possible so that users who don’t understand computing can still enjoy and use their devices. Now there’s not a great incentive to learn more than you need to just use the UI you’re given, and computing skill tends to get stuck in this local maxima. I won’t go on about my other point in detail as it’s a perennial favourite for hacker news discussion. But hardware gets faster so quickly, but our software is so hastily thrown together that it eats up all the gains. Users don’t notice that software they’re using is crap because their mental model of computing isn’t developed enough to know what’s happening. Instead we get this casting of devices as somewhat malevolent entities (“ugh, my stupid computer keeps losing my stuff. I need to buy a new one that isn’t so dumb”) We use to think this would be resolved with time and generational change, but it seems like there’s just a more-or-less static percentage of the population that just doesn’t get computers. (Which is completely understandable, people have different interests, it’s hard to inculcate an appreciation of something in your entire population, look at peoples relationships with mathematics)
- zuhayeer 5y agoSoftware engineering is becoming a base layer for all fields. Meaning there will be a lot more cross disciplinary software engineers extending a wide range of companies and industries including biotech, agriculture, space, etc. As such it isn't mutually exclusive to be a software engineer while working in a field where tech is the limit. (But even so in my opinion, software itself is still just getting its bearings)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- paxys 5y agoEvery single superficial website or app released today is built on layers upon layers of incredible continuous advances in the software world. Just in the past decade the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, data warehousing/analytics, distributed systems, real-time communication, geo syncing of data and computation, mobile/embedded development, chipsets, compilers all evolved beyond recognition. "Ideas" were and still are largely worthless. They are absolutely not the bottleneck in software today. There are a billion implementation-level problems that are still unsolved, and there will always be new ones.
- conformist 5y agoThis seems to be largely a matter of taste? A field where ideas are the limits can be great for somebody who wants their success to be driven and measured by ... their ideas? Sure, it can be frustrating to be banging your head against the same wall as everybody else, but there are people that thrive in such a setting. The most extreme example might be pure mathematicians.
- whymauri 5y agoFields where tech is the limit are fields that don't care about tech. As result, working as a software or tech IC in these fields is a grind. Never again -- no thanks! Like, I've heard senior leadership at a 'computation-focused' biotech company outright call engineers 'bad people' only to quickly correct this to 'bad at being people', which is so much better!
- whall6 5y agoAh but this is only true for people who’s competitive advantage is technology! For someone who is relatively better at ideating, I would argue the opposite is true.
- lolinder 5y ago> Innovation happens in fields where our ideas are limited by our means to pursue them. Software is no longer such a field, our brightest minds should be going elsewhere. I feel like the author has an overly one-dimensional definition of both innovation and what it means for someone to be one of "our brightest minds". There are two different goods and two different talents at play here. The first is taking an idea that already has been had and making it possible. The second is inventing new ideas. Both are goods, but each requires very different talents. Biotechnology desperately needs people who, given a great idea, can break technological barriers and enable it. If we accept that software is bottlenecked by ideas, then software desperately needs people who can radically change paradigms. "Our greatest minds" consist of both types of people.
- the_only_law 5y agoI've always imagine software is so successful as well, because of comparatively low capital costs needed to make something useful.
- jleyank 5y agoCouple of things to throw out there: 1) If you are able to bring a major drug to market 3 months earlier, it's worth billions. Hence the continued interest in computational approaches. 2) Salaries in the pharma/biotech biz are set nationally. Yeah, there are variations by geography, but less than one would expect. Thus, a PhD with x years can look up the salary range per region, etc. 3) The data is confusing and the error range(s) are unknown. So, many/most of the models are retrospective rather than prospective and if the initial guess at the biological target or model fails, everything else is a waste of time. Google for all of the failures re: Alzheimers. 3b) As we can't test on humans (at least not ethically), we're totally dependent on animal models being good predictors of human behaviour. But, while chimps are like 98% similar to humans, the difference has resulted in catastrophic failures in Phase 1 testing. Diseases by the score have been cured in mice... 4) Computational modelling occurs at the start of the process, which is the most efficient. I think they had a sequence for the mRNA vaccine a few days after the Chinese published the data. Getting it made, stable and deliverable is where the time was consumed. And then the various clinical trials are significant costs in time and money. Hard to trust a model for a new class of disease or mechanism. 5) Computational methodology has been (over)sold since the 60's. Yeah, there have been successes but they've been way fewer than hoped and people have grown rather jaded when presented with the latest breakthrough. ML/AI isn't really new as it was studied in the 90's, but there's way more data. See (3) above. 6) The crystal doesn't always form. The reaction yields brown oil rather than white powder, or doesn't scale. Chemistry is messy. And there's a lot of material design problems that have not been amenable to modelling. There are new ways of gathering information (CryoEM), but we still need more/better. 7) We need newer software and better parameterization. Both of these trace back to academic work on Vaxen, maybe SGI's. Visualization software is probably the most valuable tool right now, with broad acceptance in the research stage. 7b) Physics might bite us in the ass. MD software, for example, tries to model explicit protein, ligand and solvent atoms/molecules. Even given revised software and parameterization, entropy or chaos might prevent accurate numbers or what we can calculate might not be pertinent. I could go on (and on), but I wanted to leave you with an upside... If anybody DOES deliver the goods, they'll be bloody heroes. Fame, fortune, the whole gig - like CRISPR and the other advances that have occurred. So, if you and your buddies are smart and dedicated, it'll beat the snot out of selling ads on handhelds in terms of making a difference.
- _ihaque 5y agoThere are a lot of comments in this thread discussing biotech salaries. They're not universally true. Source: I'm the VP of data science at Recursion, a biotech company focused on drug discovery, so I manage or have visibility into hiring in the domains that most people on this site would likely be interested in. The biotech industry (which is made up of at least three rather different verticals: tools, diagnostics, and therapeutics) is changing quite a bit today. There are certainly companies that have less of a technology or data emphasis or who are still trying to figure out the value those could bring, and those companies are far less likely to pay well in SW/DS roles. There are others that either from their inception or more recently realize the value these approaches can deliver and compensate accordingly. I personally find the new wave of biotech startups that are focused on being hybrids of experimental and computational capabilities extremely exciting (which is why I'm at one) and these are the firms where software and mathematical skill sets are most likely to be valued. You'll probably still make more on Wall Street than you would in biotech. But you don't have to be _badly_ paid in order to work on a meaningful mission. OP is, IMO, correct that biology is entering a phase in which computational skills are a rate-limiting factor in our ability to make advances (note: not _the_ limit -- experiment is still absolutely critical), and it's a super exciting and impactful field to be in. Shameless plug: Recursion is hiring a TON of positions in data science and machine learning, engineering, and elsewhere. Check us out: https://www.recursion.com/careers https://www.recursion.com/careers. (Contact info is in my bio.)
- anthuswilliams 5y agoI'm a software engineer at Recursion, and Imran is telling the truth. I was on my way to posting a comment just like this when I saw this. If you're exploring the world of AI for drug discovery, IMO, it's important not to fall for the trap of companies that just do "AI on public available data". That's just the same "the fundamental problem of software is a lack of ideas" phenomenon the article was talking about. You want to meld software and data science skills with the fundamental work of whatever industry you want to be the vanguard of. Seriously, if you're in the market, check out Recursion. My contact is in my bio also, and I'll answer any questions Imran can't (or won't :p).
- junon 5y ago
- reasons 5y agoComputer science is nowhere near its maturity as a whole. It needs more people with ethics and empathy. We've seen what has happened without that factored in; we're living in it. Innovation as a goal sounds noble initially, but in my experience it's like chasing the wind. Faithfully doing what is already known to be good seems better for everyone. It might even be the quicker road to innovation.
- eternalban 5y agoTo your first point, software and computer science are in their infancy. To say software has reached its limit speaks of the abilities, and imagination of the author. As to your second point, we did have people with exceptional sense of social responsibility in software, but multiple factors, including easy/fast money, unspoken agendas, both co-opted and corrupted some, and drew in 'fresh blood' that was motivated purely by the new social cachet & easy fortunes of software work. (These are the ones Alan Kay would say are the 'pop artists' of 'pop software'.) As to innovation and "limits", there are legion and everything from the hardware, OS, libraries, to languages are on the table for innovating, to say nothing of theoretical breakthroughs in pure comp-sci. Software is the closest thing to magic we have in the modern world. The imaginal sky is the limit.
- tschellenbach 5y agoHmm, the richest country in the world just failed to build an app where you can schedule appointments. Tech might be easy for some people, but there is still a lot of room for innovation in this field.
- leetrout 5y agoTrue of any group in any industry chasing the bottom dollar and/or managed by bureaucracy.
- fancyfish 5y agoFields where tech is not at least seen as a key differentiator can be very frustrating. Expect to work in a culture where basic best practices aren’t used or even known. Expect decision makers not to understand how good software can speed up or empower research, and allocate resources accordingly. Expect salary and career growth to reflect that you are viewed as a commodity. Your enjoyment of it hinges on whether you can be happy collecting a paycheck doing the bare minimum and satisfying your tech itch outside of work (FOSS, side hustles). For some, that is perfectly acceptable or even ideal, especially if you can get away with working fully remote.
- roadnottaken 5y agobiotech != computing There are some important differences that are often overlooked by those coming from the world of computing...
- crazygringo 5y ago> Innovation happens in fields where our ideas are limited by our means to pursue them. Citation needed. I'm pretty sure innovation is happening in all fields. > Software is no longer such a field, our brightest minds should be going elsewhere. Citation needed. Pretty sure innovation is happening in software too. This post is... utterly fact-free, and really just reality-free. It literally says nothing besides "biotech excites me". The author had no need to add a bunch of false generalizations on top of that.
- sanderjd 5y agoIt is an opinion piece, not a fact piece. It isn't trying to make a factual case for the slowing pace of innovation in software, he is saying that is his impression based on his experience in the field, and then using that as a premise to explore a nugget of an idea that builds on that premise. The idea isn't "biotech excites me", the idea is "some fields are limited by the availability of new ideas and others are limited by the ability to execute their ideas; the latter are more exciting". I think a fact-based article exploring the question of whether software really does have a slowing (or just slow) pace of ideas and innovation would be much more interesting than this article, but not every article has to be factual reporting and synthesis, some can be of the form "I believe this is how the world looks, and I draw these conclusions starting from that belief". Personally, I relate to his premise, though I'm unsure it's true. It does seem to me that there aren't many new ideas in the industry. We seem to "just" be doing things we've been able to do for a very long time, but making them more accessible to more people, more efficient (with respect to human time while not necessarily computer time), and more scalable. We seem to me to be doing a lot of streamlining but not a huge amount of innovating.
- mikewarot 5y agoSoftware is still at the 4 elements stage of learning (Earth, Wind, Fire, Water). We have capability based security as a model for having computers that don't get taken out by any flaw anywhere, but... like doctors who refused to believe that washing hands helped save lives, most programmers don't believe in it, or have never heard of it. Computers used to be leading edge because anyone could just get a machine and start hacking away at it, with physical hardware being the only limit. Now our operating environments are about as secure as a forest during high fire season... only little spark, and poof... your house is gone. We're about 10 years out, not because of a lack of ideas, but because of a lack of adoption of technology that works, instead of the old stuff extended way too far on a bad local maxima.
- ptype 5y agoDepends what you optimise for I guess, maybe fine if you are looking for novel problems or starting a startup, but in general with regards to your career, I believe Patio11’s point on this is more accurate: you want to be part of the profit center [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...]
- nickdothutton 5y agoMost innovation happens these days in the gaps between disciplines. Biology||Chemistry -> Biochemistry. Whole new fusion disciplines emerge.
- shimonabi 5y agoThat is not a new thought. Chomsky was talking about this some 15 years ago.
- gumby 5y ago> Software is no longer such a field, our brightest minds should be going elsewhere. I thought this in the 1980s
- black_13 5y agoHow about being in a field where you are paid enough to live.
- eleitl 5y agoAI and simulation are absolutely HPC-bottlenecked.