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I've watched life science people spend months manually clicking boxes in the tools they have, because they don't have a developer embedded in the team to write

I've watched life science people spend months manually clicking boxes in the tools they have, because they don't have a developer embedded in the team to write some 10-liner automation scripts. Same with stats, there are all kinds of systems like GraphPad Prism which try to bridge Excel and 'real' stats, where 30 lines of python and a CSV file would save them months. More, they weren't even aware that these things could be improved. So no, I'm not convinced life science is intrinsically harder or the people there smarter. I attended some biochem and genetics classes at uni and once you have the foundations the concepts are actually pretty simple, there's just a lot of new terminology and random facts to memorize.

correcthorse123 5y ago
Agreed to some extent. "Life science" is quite broad so there's a wide range of topics with varying degrees of complexity and difficulty. I dipped my toes in various apects of life science during a biomedical engineering major. There are specialties overlapping with most traditional fields; from specialties comprising a large part of memorization like physiology, tissue engineering, and biochemistry (medicine), to hardcore organic synthesis (organic chem.), biomechanics (mechanical eng.), systems biology (control and graph theory), biosensors (physics, chem, biochem), imaging (CS::ML & physics), protein engineering/polymer science (chem, phys), bioinformatics (CS) which got me into CS/SE and programming, and many more. Often there are multidisciplinary research teams and depending on how little a specialization already overlaps with CS/SE-ish topics, having at least someone who realizes which mundane stuff can be automated can be invaluable.