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Science programming jobs suck. You get all the bad parts of academia, including less money, plus you're seen as a janitor rather than an engineer, and you get t

Science programming jobs suck. You get all the bad parts of academia, including less money, plus you're seen as a janitor rather than an engineer, and you get to deal with scientists all day. Tooling roles in SWE in every other field are highly regarded. Why not here?

convolvatron 4y ago
it depends. I've been in science support roles where people are genuinely grateful for the help, and its _really_ interesting to get to peek in on people's research. it depends on the role. it worked out really well for me when I got to drop in and do piece work on lots of projects in different fields. working on a larger software development project can be really painful and demoralizing because the people running it don't really understand how the sausage gets made.
tgv 4y ago
Because it's not what sells. It's literally a tool, and if you don't deliver the level of perfection they're used to get from sequencing, NMR or assay testing machines, you're the PITA. You really have to bring something very interesting to the table to earn some status, and software engineering just doesn't. It's too far from the core business. Think of the attitude SWEs have towards sales people...
- firstplacelast 4y ago
  The thing is many will pay big bucks to contractors/consultants/IT services/LIMS systems, but if you’re an employee, nope. They have a hard time having someone with a BS or MS making 50-75k more than a freshly-minted PhD. I just left a job in pharma because I cannot do it anymore (salary being a big one, but my experiences reflect many in this thread). They spent 500k on a consulting company to build a few NGS processing pipelines. This was built using a framework I was unfamiliar with. I re-factored one of them and was able to increase runtime by 60% in a couple weeks. I was paid in the low 100’s. They would rather contract out the high-paid work and pay orders of magnitude more for it.
sargstuff 4y ago
Well, math / computational power for simple, static protein modeling is horendus.

convolvatron 4y ago

it depends. I've been in science support roles where people are genuinely grateful for the help, and its _really_ interesting to get to peek in on people's research. it depends on the role. it worked out really well for me when I got to drop in and do piece work on lots of projects in different fields. working on a larger software development project can be really painful and demoralizing because the people running it don't really understand how the sausage gets made.

tgv 4y ago

Because it's not what sells. It's literally a tool, and if you don't deliver the level of perfection they're used to get from sequencing, NMR or assay testing machines, you're the PITA. You really have to bring something very interesting to the table to earn some status, and software engineering just doesn't. It's too far from the core business. Think of the attitude SWEs have towards sales people...

firstplacelast 4y ago
The thing is many will pay big bucks to contractors/consultants/IT services/LIMS systems, but if you’re an employee, nope. They have a hard time having someone with a BS or MS making 50-75k more than a freshly-minted PhD. I just left a job in pharma because I cannot do it anymore (salary being a big one, but my experiences reflect many in this thread). They spent 500k on a consulting company to build a few NGS processing pipelines. This was built using a framework I was unfamiliar with. I re-factored one of them and was able to increase runtime by 60% in a couple weeks. I was paid in the low 100’s. They would rather contract out the high-paid work and pay orders of magnitude more for it.

sargstuff 4y ago

Well, math / computational power for simple, static protein modeling is horendus.