Interestingly, I did computer science at Cambridge, and now I'm doing university research in genetics. I very much view what I'm doing as applied computer science, with a not-insignificant amount of software development.

By the way, you gave your supervisor quite a scare when you went off and got a computing job before you had submitted your thesis. I remember him lamenting about it quite clearly.

There's overlap between the fields, just as there is between, say, physics and genetics - but we don't usually end up telling physicists that they should be busy curing cancer rather than fucking about with subatomic particles. Different people have different aptitudes, and there aren't many people I've met in the FAANG space who'd I'd say would be well suited to wet lab work no matter how smart they are.

(And hey, I'd finished my revisions before I got the job, submitting them just ended up being a lower priority than moving to America and getting married…)

It's just as well there are areas of genetics that one can do just sat in front of a computer. I wouldn't trust me in a wet lab.