Consider working on genomics
When considering software roles in science organizations, forget assumptions you might make about a typical tech job, joining a bunch of other software and hardware people -- or you&#x27;ll risk accidentally ending up on the other side of a distorted status system (not the side that normally pampers techbros).<p>You need to feel out the particular person you&#x27;ll be reporting to on how well they personally <i>respect</i> and understand the role, and also whether they&#x27;ll have clout&#x2F;funding and have your back if the org turns out to be rough (think AMZN).  And also try to feel out respect within the organization, and some of the people&#x2F;teams with whom you&#x27;ll be collaborating.<p>You also need to check <i>compensation</i>, so you don&#x27;t wind up a low-paid person who later discovers they&#x27;re competing for local house offers with others in the org who are getting big-bucks TC (plus consulting on the side).<p>You also probably have to be OK with <i>never being the star</i> (like you hypothetically could someday be in a software company).  Supporting actors should still get respect and get paid.<p>Find the right science situation, and you might have much more positive impact on the world than you could have in a software company, <i>while also being happy and comfortable</i>.<p>Some more quick of-the-cuff comments about this (sorry for run-ons, but I need to get back to my weekend)...<p>* RESPECT -- Whether or not the organization is university-affiliated, a lot of the researchers and administrators might have only worked in academia-like environments before.  Academia is very hierarchical, software engineering might be considered commodity technician or support staff, and the high-status people almost certainly don&#x27;t understand your discipline, though they might think they do.  (They often think software is relatively easy grunt work, and that software people just have oversized egos, which has some truth to it, but not that much.)<p>(Some real-life instances of this I&#x27;ve heard of include: someone with no understanding overriding software engineering technical decisions, because a colleague from their academic caste made an offhand comment, and they assume an academic who hasn&#x27;t even looked at the system knows more than an experienced practitioner developing it; not wanting to include people who made key software contributions as coauthor on a paper for a software system, but making sure professors who had near-zero involvement were included; scientists openly speaking of the software people as having commodity interchangeable skillsets, in way they&#x27;d never speak about peers in their domain; getting an unsalvageable monstrosity of pasted-together incompatible frameworks and Stack Overflow posts done by a summer intern, dumped on software engineer to &quot;clean up&quot; or &quot;extend&quot;, and being unable to convince that this is orders of magnitude harder to fix than to just make a viable system in the same time the intern took; in an academic environment, a grad student being higher status than key software people, and bossing them around with bad decisions, while treating their own obligations like homework they were trying to sneak past a grader rather than as a system that has to actually work.)<p>* COMPENSATION -- Related to the above.  If you&#x27;re very experienced and marketable in tech, and would be making key enabling contributions, are you getting paid like it?<p>(The most recent life sciences software engineering opportunity I talked with, with a high-profile organization, they needed FAANG-like Staff&#x2F;Principal experience in multiple areas, all-in-one person, for key bespoke computational infrastructure on which a lot was riding.  When we got to salary, it was capped at less than a new grads were getting offered elsewhere, and despite being in a top HCOLA city.  The recruiter half-heartedly argued about it being for the science, etc.  I said, if they&#x27;re thinking of this as an academic non-profit, that would be OK, so long as everyone there is making this level of money.  But that wasn&#x27;t the case: the science domain people were considered the valuable assets, making good money, and software was seen as more a commodity support skill by whomever set the pay grade.  Maybe within a decade that will agree with the market, everyone will decide that someone who can learn organic chemistry should get paid more than someone who doesn&#x27;t seem to do much more than fingerpaint in a Web framework builder and type nonsense in Jira, :) and maybe then most software people will be thankful for any job at all, but not yet.)<p>(I did actually look at a science company with a strong software tech company influence.  But, though they claimed to be rethinking how the tech company did things, they seemed to carbon-copy the single most obvious bad side of that company.  Talking with colleagues after I withdrew my application, the gossip was that they were getting lots of software people who&#x27;d burnt out on the tech company.  So I guess maybe the rethinking was on what had been bothering those people, who were already at the tech company, and so who weren&#x27;t entirely representative of the talent pool that included people for whom the tech company had showstoppers.)