I work at at a SynBio company and heartily second this. If you're looking for interesting work where you can make an impact, it's an incredible field to be in.

I work at at a SynBio company and heartily second this. If you're looking for interesting work where you can make an impact, it's an incredible field to be in. I'm a nerd about everything - I love learning, and this field is incredible for it. The complexity and depth of biological systems dwarfs what we're doing in the software industry. I work with brilliant people doing absolutely fascinating work, and I get to learn more every day. At the same time, I get to build things that make a genuine contribution to the people I'm working with - I can see the value and impact of my skillset in a way that was a lot harder when I was working at a software company. The leverage that good software folks can provide to folks outside the industry is almost impossible to overstate - our ability to scale up what the practitioners in the field are doing can offer an almost category change in what they can attempt. At the same time, there's still really, really knotty software problems to be had - computer science has benefited quite a lot from our ability to segment and structure our problems, but biology doesn't allow for that - everything that we're working with is operating at every scale, from molecular interactions up through genomics into protein design and folding and into metabolic modelling. Add to that that the data structures you're dealing with can vary from a few characters up to a couple megabytes (within the same represented "object"), distant elements within the same object can interact meaningfully, the objects themselves tend to be embedded in larger structures with which they meaningfully interact, and you've got some fiendishly complex problems. And at the end of all that, you've got a field which offers a legitimate possibility of helping us move past petrochemicals; an enormous expansion in the kinds, potency, and specificity of healthcare; and a new and novel set of tools for shaping our world. It's an incredibly exciting place to be, and I've found people are genuinely thrilled to have good software folks along.