Consider working on genomics

Look, I did this at multiple places for a number of years. The issue is that you often form an adversarial relationship with the scientists. They don't really want you there. They are perfectly happy just organizing everything by hand with post its and excel spreadsheets. They do not want you to mess with their flow with your software, even if it would help them to be more efficient.

I work in this field at a large medical research institution. There is a significant amount of genomics analysis that occurs here on a day-to-day basis. The genomic processing pipeline work all falls directly into my group.

There is next to zero demand for tool development internally. I do it on the side of "normal" IT data management because I love high performance computing, algorithms, and multithreaded hackery. But even at my large, well-funded institution, there isn't a specific role where that is all that you do by design.

I do suck at marketing - meaning, despite having some success with big improvements in research tools that folks have definitely appreciated, no one comes to me asking for help with better engineering of genomic applications. Partly that is due to many researchers maybe only know R, so they will default to whatever packages are already available in Bioconductor, install those, and throw the resulting mash-up for their current research effort onto the compute cluster and simply wait for hours or days for the jobs to finish.

PIs are often insulated from software engineering problems too - if work is completed before the next bi-weekly meeting and update session, well, it must be ok.

It might seem like an exaggeration but this morning I was thinking of doing more work in scientific software. I lost my mother to cancer. This seems like a way to channel that energy and motivation. Thanks for posting, OP.

PS. Feel free to reach out. Email in profile. I’ll be happy to email around the subject.

20 years ago I got interested in "bioinformatics." I loved learning something about molecular biology, after all those years of hearing about DNA and not understanding it. And "Molecular Biology of the Cell" is, hands down, the greatest textbook ever written.

That said: a lot of the comments are spot on. You're working in a field where the hard scientists and business people rule and you're a helper. Maybe they're grateful for your help OR maybe they regard you as an overpaid lab assistant. After all, they have PhD's and postdocs, and you don't.

I've never actually worked in that field. I'd guess that it might be very satisfying, despite the low pay. Or not.

Perhaps you and the GP could compare notes about where they searched and where you advertise.