toward the end of undergrad i started thinking along the same lines you are now. I wound in a graduate program in neuroscience - a move i generally regret. Fir

toward the end of undergrad i started thinking along the same lines you are now. I wound in a graduate program in neuroscience - a move i generally regret. First, although modern science requires a lot of software, scientists refuse to recognize that crafting software is its own discipline and insist that they must be good at it because they're good at being scientists. Your skills won't be valued - they won't even be recognized. Second, the realities of biology are very different from the realities of software. If you're working with living things, be they cell cultures or mice, you'll find your schedule frequently dictated by the cycles of your experimental materials. For example: suppose your experiments work best with mice age 14 days. If a litter is born on a sunday, that means you'll be at work on a sunday two weeks later. Biological reactions are way worse than slow builds. So many biological protocols involve doing something tedious for twenty minutes, then waiting for a specific amount of time (perhaps 15 minutes , perhaps 45) and being back at precisely the right moment to do a few more minutes of painstakingly careful but tedious work. In software you would never hire 5 developers but only give them two laptops - each person needs a laptop to do their job, right? In biology the equipment is so expensive that it must be shared. This can be ok, but it also results in loss of control over your schedule. now you're not just working on sunday, but because the other student sharing equipment also needs to experiment on sunday, you're either working sunday early morning to early afternoon, or sunday early afternoon to late evening. I found science to be crowded with people trying to prove that they're the most brilliant ones in the room, people unwilling to collaborate because if a group effort succeeds you have to share the credit. In software I've found everyone happy in the knowledge that a well-functioning team can produce results at a scale unrealizable by even the most brilliant individual. In conclusion, i hated being a biologist. I didn't like the culture of science, I didn't like the work itself, and I didn't like the schedule and lifestyle it demanded. I also really didn't like killing mice. Biology is dirty work - not the worst by any means, but software is a more fun job that pays 3-10X more.