Consider working on genomics

Average salary of $58k.

Genomics companies: consider paying more.

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.

I'm a software engineer who works on genomics. I see a lot of negativity in this thread, which mirrors my experience: in most places, you'll be paid like a researcher with the respect of a lab assistant – unless you have a PhD and a postdoc.

That said, it's possible find work that's respected and pays well. Most of that kind of work is happening in the context of startups or freelancing. My favorite example of this is Robert Edgar: he's a freelance computational biologist with over 100k citations who has made a living for the past 20 years by selling licenses to his bioinformatics software (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=RzVMRc0AAAAJ).

To find those kinds of jobs, I'd try YC's Work at a Startup, Flagship Pioneering's portfolio companies, and emailing founders of companies that have a bioinformatics component (my email is in my profile!).

I think the issues with the field are because it's a new and growing space. We do need better tooling, respect for engineering, and established best practices, but that seems to have been the case in the past for other domains that moved from research to industry – including software engineering itself.

Creating pipelines is still a problem. Typically one needs to call a bunch of other tools in order to get to the final result. There could be map/reduce behavior in the middle where chunks of data are processed in parallel in order to gain speed. And you need some kind of data management/tracking as well (putting samples in groups, ingesting raw data, exporting results). And sane monitoring especially if something breaks/fails.

There are probably 100s of tools written for this but no clear winner so far. The traditional software engineering approaches like git, ci/cd seem too heavyweight (or rather too low-level) especially during development. IMHO there could be space for a fully remote/cloud solution where one would code/debug/deploy from the browser optimized for writing/maintaining pipelines.