Sorry if this isn’t the right place for this question but I couldn’t think of anywhere better to put it.
So I finished my degree in computer science a couple years ago right when the tech crash just started hitting, and the job market has been an enormous clusterfuck. Instead of trying to get a job where everyone seems to be going all-in on LLMs, machine learning, and crypto bullshit, I’d really like to be able to put my programming skills to good use helping out scientific research in some way, but I have no clue where to start. While in college I did help out my university’s biology research department by writing small programs here and there to help undergrad/grad students who weren’t very knowledgeable about technical solutions, but because of the recent funding cuts to scientific research and education, everyone there is struggling harder than I am.
Ideally I’d love to help contribute to causes that help improve people’s lives (or astronomy just because space is cool). Does anyone know of resources I could look into to start down this path?
Twenty years ago, I briefly worked for a research group doing genomics stuff. The researchers couldn’t code worth shit, so they had a hard time analyzing results in a reasonable amount of time. It was easy to be a hero.
I suspect new researchers would be way better coders (I assume AI may help too).
The pay was shit.
About those genomics stuff… most biomedical researchers still couldn’t code worth shit. It is bad enough that there are even dedicated computational biology programs now (I was in one), and from personal experience I confirm that even comp bio graduates can barely code worth shit and are also somewhat bad with biology
Pay is still shit. So… yeah.
That’s shitty on a bunch of levels. Is there a bright side? Are there jobs out there?
To be fair I might have exaggerated a bit… I can navigate my way around pretty advanced statistics/machine learning stuff, it’s just that I don’t have enough fundamentals to call myself a programmer; I assume most of my classmates are similar. But on the positive end, there are a lot more advanced methods in biomedical research now. People used a lot of cutting-edge machine learning in biomedical research (case in point: IBM and DeepMind had biomedicine in mind when they are trying to diss chess champions with AI models). Also there are some very competent programmers/research groups who ended up building open source bioinformatics tools that everyone could use, even though it seems against the hyper-competitive trend of biomedical research. So even if individual labs couldn’t do much, there are indeed better tools/pipelines available now
I… think a lot of research labs/pharmas are still pretty desperate for competent (or just any) bioinformaticians? Not in computational biology/methods development though, that field is too competitive even for me (and there are a surprisingly large amount of AI/ML/LLM slop)
Nope, most researchers are still poor coders. Coding is a skill that takes time to learn if you even have someone who can check your shit (very rare). “Vibe coding”/using AI for research analytics is probably done and it is also probably shit.
Pay is still shit.
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