I admit that - given my life situation - I'm biased towards jobs that at least have a chance of also letting me put bread on the table ;).

That said, I'm also having hard time separating academic work that helps things from that which just adds to the noise - grant-chasing, paper-generating studies. Any advice on that?

Well there's some noise like in everything else in life, but I don't think there's any empty studies (okay there's even a few cases of lying which is sad beyond words but thankfully they are very few i think).

Why does this noise bother you? Besides, keep in mind that the grant-chasing doesn't happen because of greed, it happens because people want to continue doing science and that's the only way to maintain an active lab.

I could shit on the state of academic publishing for days, but at the end of the day, there is an overall positive direction in this 'academic endeavor': the creation of knowledge.

I find this direction much lighter on my consciousness than "generate value for the shareholders"

Fair point.

The noise bothers me for two reasons. One, because grant-chasing to keep the lights on means you end up having to prioritize busy work over important problems, which wastes lives of researchers and slows the scientific endeavour. Two, because high noise makes it more difficult to find interesting/important results of other people's research.

Maybe I'm just wishing for unachievable perfection in this space.

> I could shit on the state of academic publishing for days, but at the end of the day, there is an overall positive direction in this 'academic endeavor': the creation of knowledge.

That I agree with, and I definitely complain more about the private market than scientific research because of that :).

> I find this direction much lighter on my consciousness than "generate value for the shareholders"

True, I feel the same.

Funny thing- I'm a bioinformatics making 70k and with a family. I'm ready to leave the space to make money. I'm at the point where I wouldn't mind something less altruistic -it's all the same uninteresting work. Crazy to read your stories of wanting to go the opposite direction.

Crazy indeed. Grass is always greener then? Your 70k in bioinformatics is something I'd drop my current job in a heartbeat for!

I'm very interesting in knowing what are your motivations to switch towards "something less altruistic". Could you share some more details? Maybe it really is that no matter what you do, no matter how meaningful, it'll always become a boring chore? Maybe I didn't have an meaningful job yet, so I'm not disillusioned?

I think the best way to describe the issue is to consider why people claim being in healthcare is bad (try googling around for whether it's worth being a doctor because you feel called to help people). Healthcare (and biotech feeds into healthcare) is very heirarchial, so advancement gets blocked. There are better ways to find meaning than the field you work in. Like all technology jobs it's viewed as grunt work compared to MD/PI/regulation visionaries. My main motivation is cash and experience that are difficult to get in an underfunded and sinking industry; genomics is really struggling to float as science progresses to new fields not out of the ninety's. I feel like someone stuck in a third world country watching America glitter into the sunset. Sure I make very interesting products but it is boiled down into the same day to day mundane work, but for less pay. We might get a thank you letter from someone thanking us for extending their life and that is awesome for someone like me who is not their doc. But I'm like a firefighter- utterly unappreciated by everyone else no matter what interesting piece I work on. And it's hard to save much for retirement. I haven't felt the void you feel. I would rather make a less drastic but equally important impacts on people in my spare time like as a coach- think of Maslow's heirarchy of needs and how healthcare inverts parts of it.

I see in this thread lots of people who have their security level established and are now looking to fill their social level. I feel inverted on the subject and let's just say Maslow's order matters.

As an academia in CS, I use two filters:

* top-tier peer-reviewed conference.

* paper abstract and introduction.

If I am not convinced that the problem is interesting by introduciton, I will skip it.

Any paper that generates or analyzes draft genomes is a waste of money.

I’ve been out of the genome-sequencing space for quite a few years now, but that seems a pretty strong assertion and I’m curious about your rationale. Is it that the analysis will need to be re-done in future? Or do you think the space is saturated?

I left the game in 2015, but even then third generation sequencing could close bacterial genomes for < $1k. Long reads make it trivial to detect all sorts of stuff (sample mixup, contamination, phage activity, in vitro evolution) that goes unnoticed with short reads. Since the conclusion of large scale draft genome sequencing papers always seems to be 'we need a bigger sample size' anyway, I feel the money would be better spent on studying individual strains of bacteria.

Ah yes, I was mostly out of it before short-reads-only genomes were a common thing. “Draft” meant a slightly different thing in the Sanger sequencing days.