This definitely was the culture when I started working in the field 6 years ago. However, the culture has shifted (at least where I work) to where biologists and engineers are equal partners that work together on solving these problems. For those organizations that are not this way, I think they’re going to have to change if they want to innovate.
These days more biotech companies are computationally/software focused. They understand that to pull in strong talent they're not operating in the same academic science world.
This isn't just genomics, by the way. Scientific computing folks are very similar.
Looking at it from their point of view: CS people tend to think that "everything is just information, and now that we're here you're all going to be working for us."
You can see why a PhD in mol bio would resent that. Everything is not just information.
Tangential, but what are the chemistry prereqs to grasp this book?
It's essentially an upper-level undergraduate textbook.
I would argue that, to understand the book, you specifically don't need to know electrochemistry, organic chemistry, analytical chemistry, organometallics, spectroscopy, or even physical chemistry.
But, YMMV.
Everything you don't understand looks complicated from the outside.
It was my first fulltime job, and by far the most chill. People were great. The PI was laid back, the whole lab went out for beers every now and then - and not because of a mandatory startup-style 'bonding' event. We genuinely enjoyed each others company and hung out outside of work. I never had that in any other job, which were/are all commercial operations.
The vibe and the power structure felt very different. More level. There werent any purely managerial roles, everyone was doing at least a bit of 'science'. And even junior ICs like me got to coach undergrads every now and then. Most of the operational budget comes from grants, on which you have to deliver. The pay is not amazing, so most employees really are in it for the science.
Or I was still young and naive and was lucky all of the two layers of management were all nice people.
Ultimately I left, as the grant money coudnt keep up with offers I was getting.
It is still the job I am most proud of. I love talking about it, and it really sucks that even a well funded lab cant really afford market engineering rates.
He proceeded to completely understand hidden markov models and protein sequence alignment and was immediately hacking improvements to HMMER. However, Sean Eddy couldn't understand his optimizations (Sean has to know how HMMER works at all times) and so Bob went off and made his own tools like MUSCLE.
One of the reasons he can do this is, well, he's a programmer/math genius, and the other reason is that HMMs and protein alignments are a fairly well understood and programmable thing these days.
Still blows me away we train up all these people to be scientists when there are no jobs for them in that role.
Doing fundamental reseach is a taller order. But lots of software, tools, pipelines etc need maintainers, optimizations...
Most of the packages on bioconda (https://bioconda.github.io/) are open source. But you probably want to find a sub-field that interests you most before finding a project.
In grad school, we also had an ex-google software engineer volunteer with us one day a week. It was very impactful for many members of the lab to learn good engineering practices, and it wasn't at all like the sentiment others in this thread are expressing where engineers were "janitors".
Its no different in finance, healthcare, genomics etc. I'd love to work in a setting where I'm paired with an SME product manager in a domain I have no clue about and they respect my work and I respect theirs and we are partners.
This is one of the biggest factors that made software/internet companies explode. They respected people who build software. They didn't need to. A bunch of MBAs could have easily just decided that the best way to run the company was to treat the people building the product as a cost center. Many did. I think that's probably one of the reason for the lack of innovation and down fall in many old tech companies like HP/IBM.
The ones that treated SWEs properly and valued them accordingly, did very well.
Your comment reminds me to be thankful that at many software companies engineering, product, and design do respect each other as equal partners. I totally agree that to do otherwise is business suicide.
MD's -> patient interest comes first
MBA's -> company interest comes first
As to the work environment, it seems to be extremely varied depending on the lab and team your on. I came from a number of years doing web development in marketing and finance before joining an R1 university research lab, and in many ways the day-to-day is quite similar in both fields. You are not the 'go-to' person for most things, but with that said, even as an individual contributor I feel my voice is heard on technical decisions where appropriate. As for pay, it's the biggest aspect that will make me leave at some point. If you do not have a PhD, or even a degree in my case, you can't expect to get paid a lot. As to the speculation on the satisfaction of the work, it is indeed deeply satisfying!
I got to have a conversation with one of the hero donors that gave a kidney biopsy after a life-saving transplant. It's hard to overstate just how impactful your work feels when talking to someone like that. Even as a small cog in the larger machine (our lab is around 50 strong with many people being at the top of their sub-fields), the end results of the effort will be massive improvements in individuals quality of life, this alone makes it quite easy to get out of bed in the morning.
This wouldn't apply to other fields such as Immunology (Janeway's Immunobiology) where I have purchased multiple copies of the years due to the field changing so fast.
An awful lot has changed since 2000. RNA is now a Thing, where it was just a poor stepchild before. Protein folding, of course.
But yeah. The pictures are shining examples of what a scientific diagram can be.
Everyone who says you're the hired help and treated about as well as a secretary that the organization dislikes is dead on. At best, you're viewed as an overpaid cost center.
Which is sad, because I'd love to work in these areas... but I'm not giving up 66% to 75% of my income to as charity to private corporations.
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.