Consider working on genomics
I&#x27;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&#x27;ll be paid like a researcher with the respect of a lab assistant – unless you have a PhD and a postdoc.<p>That said, it&#x27;s possible find work that&#x27;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&#x27;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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;citations?user=RzVMRc0AAAAJ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;citations?user=RzVMRc0AAAAJ</a>).<p>To find those kinds of jobs, I&#x27;d try YC&#x27;s Work at a Startup, Flagship Pioneering&#x27;s portfolio companies, and emailing founders of companies that have a bioinformatics component (my email is in my profile!).<p>I think the issues with the field are because it&#x27;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.