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Be in a field where tech is the limit

mathiaskirkbonde.substack.com

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Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#81

Post by asdff »

2bitencryption wrote: post #43

> Biotechnology sounds to me much like computing in the 60’s. One thing I've always wondered about biotech... I imagine there are many non-obvious correlations and interactions in medicine, which would be easily detected using nothing more advanced than Excel-spreadsheet level data analysis. Making up an example: people with a certain DNA trait/allele who also have a diet with a high amount of XYZ tend to not develop…

This work has infact been happening for decades. You are right that a lot of bioinformatics is analysis of tabular data using statistical models.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#82

Post by [deleted] »

fridif wrote: post #69
_Wintermute wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked as a post-doc at a pharma company in Europe, our research-based department was in need of a software engineer as our collection of crappy R/python scripts couldn't actually be linked up to any equipment or processes. HR asked what sort of salary range we were looking at, we suggested that we won't get any decent candidates for less than 70k EUR and were laughed out of the room and they decided on a 50k limit…

I don't understand, you guys have PhDs, why can't you write a script yourself? Porting it to java will speed it up a few x, and if it uses some silly library like pandas or numpy or spark then consider it a great time to rewrite it from scratch properly with no dependencies :)

[deleted]

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#83

Post by hellbannedguy »

whateveracct wrote: post #20
nicbou wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That also has its disadvantages. Being stuck in an office with little work, but little else in the way of entertainment slowly burns you out. Having next to no work for two months wasn't as pleasant as I thought it would be. Fields where you don't make other people wealthy aren't so rosy either. They bring their own drama to the table.

The trick there is to work remotely. You can just build software, make art, do your own side-business 8hrs/day while hitting the employer's bar of "I'll keep paying this guy" and keep that income flowing.

I would like to see a government sponsored campaign on the benefits of working at home. I feel like most employers are counting the seconds until they can bring us back in? "You can All come back to the office! I bet you have been waiting for this? Marg had a baby over Covid? We increased the lux rat of our office lighting--yea! Jerry Suckup made assistant to the assistant manager, but this is on a probationary basis. Gas up the jalopy, and come in! Oh yea, we have a new facial recognition system instead of a punch clock. Those kooky tech guys?"

The benifits I see:

1. No commute. (Getting cars off the road is good for global warming?) And my sanity when I do need to go somewhere.

2. More sleep.

3. Less busy work to keep some middle manager happy.

4. Happier employee.

5. I have no clue over productivity.

negatives:

1. I guess schmoozing is important for some people. I did make most of my younger self's friends at work because we were both at the same lousy job?

2. Some people find office banter comradery important for their mental health? I used to be one of those people, but would happily give up a little socialization for more sleep, and less hrs driving.

If the government spent some tax money on a campaign to keep workers home, if the job was doable at home, I would be behind it.

I wouldn't even mind if they gave credits to employers who didn't drag their employees into a office.

Frame the promotion over Global Warming, and not employee satisfaction. We all know employees are way down on the list of what they care about, but a tax credit, and some kind of carbon rebate whatnot might keep many of us home? And less cars on the road. In my county, it seemed like everyone went out and bought a second car. Traffic is back to unbearable in the Bay Area.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#84

Post by jleyank »

Couple of things to throw out there:

1) If you are able to bring a major drug to market 3 months earlier, it's worth billions. Hence the continued interest in computational approaches.

2) Salaries in the pharma/biotech biz are set nationally. Yeah, there are variations by geography, but less than one would expect. Thus, a PhD with x years can look up the salary range per region, etc.

3) The data is confusing and the error range(s) are unknown. So, many/most of the models are retrospective rather than prospective and if the initial guess at the biological target or model fails, everything else is a waste of time. Google for all of the failures re: Alzheimers.

3b) As we can't test on humans (at least not ethically), we're totally dependent on animal models being good predictors of human behaviour. But, while chimps are like 98% similar to humans, the difference has resulted in catastrophic failures in Phase 1 testing. Diseases by the score have been cured in mice...

4) Computational modelling occurs at the start of the process, which is the most efficient. I think they had a sequence for the mRNA vaccine a few days after the Chinese published the data. Getting it made, stable and deliverable is where the time was consumed. And then the various clinical trials are significant costs in time and money. Hard to trust a model for a new class of disease or mechanism.

5) Computational methodology has been (over)sold since the 60's. Yeah, there have been successes but they've been way fewer than hoped and people have grown rather jaded when presented with the latest breakthrough. ML/AI isn't really new as it was studied in the 90's, but there's way more data. See (3) above.

6) The crystal doesn't always form. The reaction yields brown oil rather than white powder, or doesn't scale. Chemistry is messy. And there's a lot of material design problems that have not been amenable to modelling. There are new ways of gathering information (CryoEM), but we still need more/better.

7) We need newer software and better parameterization. Both of these trace back to academic work on Vaxen, maybe SGI's. Visualization software is probably the most valuable tool right now, with broad acceptance in the research stage.

7b) Physics might bite us in the ass. MD software, for example, tries to model explicit protein, ligand and solvent atoms/molecules. Even given revised software and parameterization, entropy or chaos might prevent accurate numbers or what we can calculate might not be pertinent.

I could go on (and on), but I wanted to leave you with an upside... If anybody DOES deliver the goods, they'll be bloody heroes. Fame, fortune, the whole gig - like CRISPR and the other advances that have occurred. So, if you and your buddies are smart and dedicated, it'll beat the snot out of selling ads on handhelds in terms of making a difference.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#85

Post by _ihaque »

There are a lot of comments in this thread discussing biotech salaries. They're not universally true. Source: I'm the VP of data science at Recursion, a biotech company focused on drug discovery, so I manage or have visibility into hiring in the domains that most people on this site would likely be interested in.

The biotech industry (which is made up of at least three rather different verticals: tools, diagnostics, and therapeutics) is changing quite a bit today. There are certainly companies that have less of a technology or data emphasis or who are still trying to figure out the value those could bring, and those companies are far less likely to pay well in SW/DS roles. There are others that either from their inception or more recently realize the value these approaches can deliver and compensate accordingly. I personally find the new wave of biotech startups that are focused on being hybrids of experimental and computational capabilities extremely exciting (which is why I'm at one) and these are the firms where software and mathematical skill sets are most likely to be valued.

You'll probably still make more on Wall Street than you would in biotech. But you don't have to be _badly_ paid in order to work on a meaningful mission. OP is, IMO, correct that biology is entering a phase in which computational skills are a rate-limiting factor in our ability to make advances (note: not _the_ limit -- experiment is still absolutely critical), and it's a super exciting and impactful field to be in.

Shameless plug: Recursion is hiring a TON of positions in data science and machine learning, engineering, and elsewhere. Check us out: https://www.recursion.com/careers. (Contact info is in my bio.)

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#86

Post by sjs7007 »

sheer_audacity wrote: post #33

Sigh. Speaking as someone who has spent the last six years of their career working on advanced physics in various technology sectors (including biotech) and then trying to make various 2D-xene materials work for semiconductors, I’ll tell you one thing: They pay you shit and if you think you’re all treated badly in FAANG, hoooboy, at least nobody has nearly caused deaths in the lab through negligence!

> if you think you're all treated badly in FAANG

No one thinks that. Workload at some places maybe a little on the higher side but still on average monetary and toll on life wise FAANG is probably one of the best jobs.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#87

Post by reasons »

Computer science is nowhere near its maturity as a whole. It needs more people with ethics and empathy. We've seen what has happened without that factored in; we're living in it.

Innovation as a goal sounds noble initially, but in my experience it's like chasing the wind. Faithfully doing what is already known to be good seems better for everyone. It might even be the quicker road to innovation.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#88

Post by gilbetron »

What a horrible article - the tech startup world is booming and ML, amongst other things, will create vast opportunities. This is the same drek I heard back in the early 2000s after the dot com bust. Literally heard people say, "I think all the great ideas in tech have already happened."

Most of the time when someone is saying something that amounts to "I can't imagine what else we could make", it's a failure of their imagination that's the problem.

Re: Be in a field where tech is the limit

#90

Post by rablackburn »

ausbah wrote: post #65
kemiller wrote: post #50

I think he's got it exactly wrong — the reason we have seen a lot of "non-tech tech" companies is that software still fundamentally kinda sucks. We have become so used to it we don't always notice, but software is a fragile nightmare to work with. It's like trying to build skyscrapers with tinkertoys, and it's a miracle we can do as much as we do. Software needs a leap; AI/ML might be the start of it, not sure yet.

why does it fundamentally suck? anything specific in mind?

Not the poster you were replying to, but I’ve come to the same conclusion and here’s my not-particularly-rigorous reasoning:

It seems to be equal parts users stuck in a local maxima of computing skill and how that enables lax software engineering standards.

When’s the last time you’ve sat down with a user who isn’t remotely interested in tech and watch them work/use a computer? Most of the population’s mental model of a computer is starkly different to the average hacker news reader. You can still hear the same complaints about how computers “don’t do what i want it to do” that i remember my parents generation saying, and they were experiencing the first waves of computerisation in their offices.

The story became that the older generation just couldn’t understand the new generation, but kids are amazing with computers because they’re growing up with them. Well, some of those kids are just as hopeless. It’s partly an education problem (hard to learn computing from a teacher who doesn’t understand it themselves), and partly because UI design trended to simplifying everything as much as possible so that users who don’t understand computing can still enjoy and use their devices. Now there’s not a great incentive to learn more than you need to just use the UI you’re given, and computing skill tends to get stuck in this local maxima.

I won’t go on about my other point in detail as it’s a perennial favourite for hacker news discussion. But hardware gets faster so quickly, but our software is so hastily thrown together that it eats up all the gains. Users don’t notice that software they’re using is crap because their mental model of computing isn’t developed enough to know what’s happening. Instead we get this casting of devices as somewhat malevolent entities (“ugh, my stupid computer keeps losing my stuff. I need to buy a new one that isn’t so dumb”)

We use to think this would be resolved with time and generational change, but it seems like there’s just a more-or-less static percentage of the population that just doesn’t get computers. (Which is completely understandable, people have different interests, it’s hard to inculcate an appreciation of something in your entire population, look at peoples relationships with mathematics)

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