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Ask Slashdot: Scientific Research Positions For Programmers?
An anonymous reader writes "I recently (within the past couple years) graduated from college with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and currently work as a programmer for a large software consulting firm. However, I've become gradually disillusioned with the financial-obsession of the business world and would like to work for the overall betterment of humanity instead. With that in mind, I'm looking to shift my career more toward the scientific research side of things. My interest in computer science always stemmed more from a desire to use it toward a fascinating end — such as modeling or analyzing scientific data — than from a love of business or programming itself. My background is mostly Java, with some experience in C++ and a little C. I have worked extensively with software analyzing big data for clients. My sole research experience comes from developing data analysis software for a geologic research project for a group of grad students; I was a volunteer but have co-authorship on their paper, which is pending publication. Is it realistic to be looking for a position as a programmer at a research institution with my current skills and experiences? Do such jobs even exist for non-graduate students? I'm willing to go to grad school (probably for geology) if necessary. Grad school aside, what specific technologies should I learn in order to gain an edge? Although if I went back to school I'd focus on geology, I'm otherwise open to working as a programmer for any researchers in the natural sciences who will take me."
... geology isn't a real science!!
The term is usually "research programmer" or something similar. However they're often time-limited positions rather than indefinite. A common arrangement is that a university gets a big grant, and needs to bring in some extra programmers to help out on the project for the ~3 years of a typical grant. The best-funded labs do keep some programming staff on semi-permanent payroll, though, because they always get a new round of grants before the previous ones run out.
I'd just start looking at job listings in the area you care about and see what skills or experience they ask for. Familiarity with data-analysis tools is often a plus, e.g. be conversant in R, be able to make some nice visualizations of data, etc. But that's only one area; there are plenty of others.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I think a solution a lot of people find is to split their day: they pay their bills with a job they can (just about) tolerate, and then use their free time to focus on their passion, perhaps in a small community (cf. FOSS development).
Also, academia is no paradise either: it's not so much about focusing on what you are interested in, but rather focusing on where there is funding, and where you can find your own niche. It's surprising and depressing how many niches are already filled: it's like trying to find an empty shell on the ocean floor.
I can talk from my experience in Europe. Although you may have the experience and knowledge to do the research successfully; going to grad school will open many doors. You will have access to information about ongoing projects, publications, etc ... And by the way you will fill some possible weak points in your knowledge about the subject.
About technologies; you must be flexible; just know how to program, not on a specific language. Anyway, I recommend you to get to know (and learn to love) Matlab.
Very often scientific research implies the need to do some programming. But in most cases, science comes first, and programming is a secondary (although often a crucial) skill. If you like to do science, go for a grad school in science (look for what science would you like to contribute to), and your programming skills will be in demand -- sometimes!
I suggest gaining more experience by joining or creating a friendly open-source community (focused on scientific computing, e.g., vtk.org, itk.org, slicer.org, paraview.org) and learning the ropes. Or as you say joining a research organization in the capacity as a junior programmer, or graduate student. Software skills are important but what might be more important is technologies, since programming languages come and go quickly. For example, understand how to basic 3D graphics works, and then study implementations on GPUs. Or learn algorithms for high-performance computing and then study tools like MPI or Boost to understand implementations.
You might be happy somewhere like http://crd.lbl.gov/
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I just completed a job search looking for basically the same kind of jobs as you as someone with a Ph.D (in physics, so slightly different, but still), and it seemed like there was a *lot* more out there for someone with only a BA/BS or masters and a few years of job experience than for someone straight out of grad school. The issue might be where you're looking for jobs. The DC area has tons of research positions, most supporting the federal government in some way (more than just defense contractors, and defense contractors do more than just design weapons). The federal government (especially the intelligence agencies) also advertise openings for people with your background and interest.
Well, You also could work for an investment bank, get the big pay checks and continue working out your plan while doing it :-P
;-).
Seriously, have ever thought about going for an academic career? What I have seen is there are many people in organisations who are stuck in their jobs. This is mainly because their monthly fixed costs are high and they don't have a clear plan what they want to do with their life and how to finance it. Until you've figured it out I would suggest sticking with your current situation - or go for a job in an investment bank
If you want to get into scientific research programming with big data, you are probably going to have to engage with statistical programming. R is probably the lang of choice at least in the biological arena, due to FOSS and all the prebuilt packages. People also I've seen using Matlab quite a bit, but I think you wouldn't go wrong with R. You might also want to get engaged in something like Kaggle or the DREAM challenges, build yourself a bit of a profile on those arenas, and eventually try to team up with some guys on one of the challenges there, as a way of making contact with people in the big data research area. Any graduate training (postgrad as it would be called in Europe), would only help - there are many positions that just won't be available to you until you have had a 'research training' which means Masters as a minimum or preferably a PhD eventually.
Korma: Good
The NSA do all kinds of interesting mathematics. Betterment of humanity though? Eh...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I reckon academia is heading towards hiring more programmers. We often have research grants where one of the employed researchers could be a statsy person with publications in the learned journals, or a computery person with lots of stuff shared in github and contributions to open-source projects and so on. The prof as PI on the grant is impressed by the former, I'm (as CI) impressed by the latter. Currently we tend to favour the statsy people, and they are often very poor programmers with little knowledge of version control, testing, Makefiles, awk, all that nerdy stuff that could make their life simpler. So I teach them...
I can only really talk confidently about statistics here (sample size = 1) but I know a bit about other places. University College London has a Research Software Development Team, for example: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/research-software-development/ and the whole development of programming skills for researchers is being pushed by the SSI (software.ac.uk) of which I am a fellow.
You might also want to look at Software Carpentry, a programme for training researchers in programming skills - there may be opportunities there.
So currently there's a few opportunities, but its getting better. A final thought though - you want to leave "the financial-obsession of the business world and would like to work for the overall betterment of humanity instead". Hahahaahha rofl. Academia is just as financially-obsessed as any trading house. I'm spending today doing paperwork for expenses claims, travel, grant proposals... Its all about the money... Oh do I sound disillusioned? Okay, I have probably stopped some people catching malaria, but not today...
Depends on what level you are working at I guess. If you want to directly write the code that does science, then yeah analysis languages like R are quite useful. However, you can still support science and be involved in scientific programming without writing a line of code that applies only to science.
My advisor in grad school's biggest contribution to scientific computing was designing and implementing(with some outside help) a distributed, POSIX-compatible file system specifically optimized for the sorts of access patterns that are common in science. It's written entirely in C and you don't need to know a single principle about nuclear fission to help out. To the OP, if you have a solid background in science, then maybe going to grad school for a science may be useful, but if not catching up is going to be a bitch....I would recommend going to grad school for CS in a field such as distributed file systems/computing, parallel computing, gpgpu etc that can be used by science, but for which you don't have a to have a background in science in order to make a meaningful contribution.
Monstar L
How about looking at universities, and specifically fields where there is a lot of good to be done but aren't 'natural' homes for programmers? e.g. Life Sciences, agriculture, biology etc.
Separately, there are all the @home projects, which can always use programmers (and do occasionally recruit from amongst their contributors).
All your ghosts are just false positives.
First comment from me, is that this is a laudable goal, and OP has my respect for wanting to help the world.
Second comment is that, from my limited (Electronics, Integrated Circuit Engineering, Machine Vision/AI) experience in academia, most of the research there is commercially driven, either because a large corp has come along with a wad of money and asked the institution to research something specific, or because the institution has an eye toward commercially applicable research, via patents on something or through a commercial enterprise linked to the research institution.
I definitely think there are options for OP to get into "pure" research, and the way I would go about it is to get into one of the Graduate Research programs (Masters/Ph.D) at an institution that is doing something interesting and where faculty staff make positive noises about retaining post-grads as research fellows, and then make it clear that I am interested in staying on as a research fellow after finishing the program. It might work, or it might not. Also, research fellowships are typically not a long-term option in my experience, being 2-3 years or until the money runs out, whichever is shorter.
Then, you get companies like Google (with their 75/20/5% time split for working on core, off-the-wall, and personal stuff) or Intel (who do a lot of research, but again, commercially-driven). :)
The days of Bell Labs and their almost pure "research for the fun of it" are pretty much gone... you can find a bit of that spirit in a lot of places, but it is typically one of the first things to be cut when the company and economy are doing well, and one of the last things to be started/supported when things are picking up. So now is probably not the best time to be looking for this kind of opportunity
Welcome to the club. Now get back in line. :p
Seriously though, I think, with the exception of the "Alex P. Keatons" among us, virtually all programmers would rather work doing some sort of pure research for the betterment of humanity, than helping some sycophantic management team please the board/stockholders for yet another quarter.
Reality of the situation, though, you (and I, and all of us) have chosen the very same thing you claim has disillusioned you. You have chosen to want a paycheck. Make no mistake, for every one software engineering job position you see posted, you can find a hundred good causes that need volunteer coders. Except, good luck getting a steady paycheck if you go that route - Short of actually becoming a professor, you very much need to treat it as an act of charity.
Which leaves you to ask yourself: Can you really afford to live without a paycheck? If you can't answer "yes" without hesitation, hey, they don't call it "work" because we go there to have eight hours of fun every day.
As a compromise solution many of us have taken, do your good deeds on the side. Get that paycheck, and put 10-20 hours a week into a FOSS project, or helping the local foodbank set up a useable LAN from their pile of 15 year old mostly-DOA donated junk, or if you still have a few "in"s at your university, ask a few of your favorite non-CS professors if they have any projects that could use your skills (almost all of them do). But make a living first and foremost.
I work at a large research organization. I'll tell you how it is here, it will be similar at other places:
* We have research staff and non research staff (lawyers, personal assistants, software engineers, ...) ...
* All research staff must have a PhD in the field of their research position. I.e. if you want to do research, do a PhD first.
* Software engineers don't need a PhD, but we require a bachelors in IT or equivalent experience.
* Software engineers assist in research, but do not lead it. I.e. you don't get to work on your ideas, but on somebody else's. Still, it's research and some of it can be argued to be for the good of mankind.
* Almost all research is not as exiting as it is cracked up to be. Direct connections to the good of mankind are very rare.
* Most research projects are very small and you may be the only software engineer on it. Not all software engineers work well in such an environment.
* Most software you produce is very alpha and never gets further (run once, point proven, let's move on). This can be frustrating and also bad for your CV since you can't really claim you shipped a product for real customers.
* Work is not different than interesting jobs at industry such as IBM, Microsoft, Google,
* These days the research world is very financially obsessed, and research projects are most of the time determined and restricted by what your group can get funding for (rather than what is for the common good).
I can tell you that with out a PhD, your are viewed as little more than a trained chimp. Masters in both CS and Applied Math seemed to mean nothing, the fact that these so called doctors were incapable of writing more than 4 lines of intelligible code was beside the point.
It was fairly annoying, and none of my work is cited in their papers.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
A friend of mine is a computational chemist. He comes from a chemistry background, but has for some years now been writing software for simulating cell receptors to help find matching proteins for them. He's even part authored 3(?) books on KNIME which is written in Java. In his experience skilled programmers with maths knowledge are hard to find in the field because most come from a chemistry background rather than a computer science background.
That seems to be good match for you.
Three words: Math, math, and math.
If you don't have the advanced math skills, your use to a scientific research effort will be limited.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
Consider climate research. In the US that might be NCAR or GFDL. Lots of FORTRAN but newer languages common, too. Use applied physics. World Class supercomputers. Parallel algorithms. Lower pay scale. Some, not all, scientists pigeon hole programmers and look down on them.
I recently shifted my career from microbiology to systems biology. The thinking end of biosciences in the UK is becoming dominated by computer science. Data analysis, modelling, simulation, and subsequent hypothesis generation are increasingly being given to computer science over biological sciences, who have allowed themselves to drop their numerical / analytical abilities. Linear algebra and quadrattic programming for skills such as flux balance analysis are hugely lucrative in biotech start-ups modelling metabolism. I think ordinary differential equation modelling of biological interactions isn't going anywhere, but statistical modelling for clinical trial design using non-linear mixed effects modelling is enormously lucrative. Optimization for data fitting is also a handy skill set to drop into these as well. Statistics, maths, and computer science graduates going into clinical research organizations can expect to earn 3x the salary of a biosciences graduate going into a lab, and the availability of jobs is significantly higher. Typically they're asking for programming skills in C, Matlab, R, Python, and Java. Bioinformatics roles mining databases is Java, Perl and R and involves database design and graph theory. Modelling and simulation is all C and Matlab, with Python gaining popularity over Matlab due to cost. I've used Mathematica a bit, but Matlab for most. My colleagues all code in Matlab, R or C. Image analysis is also becoming important as high throughput phenotypic screening is in vogue. The people I know in this area are using tools like Matlab and Definians. You will need a PhD in computer science to land the big paying jobs in pharma, and the PhD research will need to be based on biological data of some sort, but the association can be very loose as long as you can code and pick up basic biology along the way. Alternatively, a solid portfolio of projects is also tempting industry due to the lack of skills on the market, and could supplement an M.Sc instead of investing time in a PhD. Personally, I'm seeing a golden age for computer science and maths graduates earning £40-60k straight out of a PhD. Wet lab scientists are starting £16 - 23k, and are increasingly relegated to generating data for computer scientists who are leading the projects. If I had my time again I would train in computer science and see if I could get into the statistical modelling for clinical trials. Do that for a few years, then go freelance and watch the money roll in.
From reading your post, I saw myself a few years back. After working a couple of years in industry I quickly learned that I would rather apply my skills to more than just making some guy rich. Luckily, I managed to score at job at CSIRO (Australia's governamental research institution) as a developer - and it was awesome and fulfilling. After a few years I had the opportunity to move to Europe, and in wanting to stay within the research domain, I started a PhD at SAP. From my experience so far I can say that, as mentioned, finding stable development work in research is very difficult - these institutions rely on external funding to operate and they have little control over that. But, if you are willing to deal with the uncertainty of 3 year contracts, it's totally doable - I would say try to find a position in a major institution so that even if funding dries up on one project, you can sell yourself into other projects. Another thing that I would stress is think *very* carefully before taking the PhD route - this is NOT development work and the is so much in the periphery (working on unrelated projects, TA'ing, trying to get a hold of your professor, writing/presenting papers) which seriously departs from the simple pleasure of building something and making it work. Even in the case of someone who is passionate about research, has and loves a topic, PhDs make for a pretty miserable existence. Unless you want to become and academic, I would suggest sticking to the developer route. Good luck!
It sounds like you want to work with a scientific group as a programmer, not be doing your own independent research. If this is true there are a variety of positions out there. My experience is in life sciences and imaging. There are research institution like the Broad Institute http://www.broadinstitute.org/ or HHMI Janelia Farms http://www.janelia.org/ that staff a fair number of programmers. Also, many Universities have core imaging facilities and there may be similar types of facilities in other scientific areas.
There also a significant number of companies that do research. Bioinformatics is a big topic for example pharmaceutical companies so big data experience is important. There are plenty of biotech companies too, some are providing research, some are trying to develop profitable technologies such as new tools for discovery and bio fuel etc. A number of companies that provide instrumentation and software to do research. There are a number of large players, such as Thermo Scientific, GE and Dananaher companies such as ABSciex, Beckman and Coulter. Obviously any company will be profit driven, so you will have to decide whether it is for you, but the jobs will contribute to research one way or another.
My suggestion is to get some scientific journal in you field of interest. Look at the advertiser and institution that do interesting things. Then go the websites of these places and see what openings may be out there. If you find something really interesting in a research paper that clearly involves computing you should directly contact them and see if they are interested in hiring. Most researcher are interested in the research problem and don't want to spend all there time coding. Often they are not good at finding developers just like developers are not good at finding these small research position. They may welcome someone who is interested enough in their researcher to seek them out. They might also point you to someone who will.
I spent 20+ years doing such things at large oil companies. Last major project was a 300x600 mile model of rock properties in the Gulf of Mexico for a super major. Geology is ripe for big data analyses. You need the discipline knowledge to succeed and communicate w/ the rest of the team.
1) expect to deal w/ lots of old, badly written code. That's what the scientists will often have as a "specification".
2) the original code you write will mostly be throwaways that won't get thrown away. Research doesn't produce polished products. Norm is many small to medium size programs stitched together w/ shell scripts.
3) go to a highly ranked grad school (e.g. Austin, Stanford, etc) if possible. The personal contacts will be invaluable.
4) scientists will often treat you as a 2nd class team member even if you have the scientific credentials. However, if you manage it properly, you'll get paid the same as they do. ($80-100k entry level for a PhD in geosciences. Possibly more by the time you finish)
5) it will cost you 4-6 years working as a grad student at slave wages to get the needed credentials.
It's not all fun, but most of the time it is.
Have Fun!
Reg
PS checkout Seismic Unix from cwp.mines.edu
You can look at working for government agencies. If you are in the USA, look at positions at NOAA, USGS, NASA and other places. Telescopes in Hawai'i (and Chile) are also hiring software developers.
In my case, I work at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (in Canada) and developed systems that are used by ships transiting the St. Lawrence Seaway and maintain systems that are collecting data from satellites (remember the epic-fail dropped a satellite on the shop floor meme - it is NOAA-19 and we collect its signal).
There are definitely positions at the Bachelor and Master level (In Comp.Sci or equivalent) at universities and research institutes.
Also don't forget large oil firms and the like.
There are two types:
- Scientific Programmers: Those that work on implementing, scaling and optimizing algorithms for number crunching purposes. Knowledge of the specific field is certainly an advantage here.
- Generic Programmers: From lab automation to webpages, database backends, archives and various other things that organisations need to do their work.
It's hard to get a permanent contract though, as a lot of the funding is on projects for 2-5 years.
Job adverts might be on the sites of the organisations themselves and sometimes the employers have a combined website. In the Netherlands there is AcademicTransfer for example, where all publicly funded research organisations pool their job adds.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
The so-called "interdisciplinary" research projects can benefit greatly from your programing skills, if you take them to a new field. I guess that you have already proven, through your co-operation with geologists, that you are able to grasp a new topic and reach a high level of competency in that field (as in being co-author in a paper in that discipline), so you should definitely play that card while applying, in my opinion.
Traveling, as well as learning/using a new language should be considered. I tried Germany and it turned out really well. Central european countries in general have quite good research projects and you can get a job at a university paying about 1500-1700 Euros per month after taxes plus full benefits (health insurance and pension).
As for the field, start with looking in geology projects, but don't restrict yourself to that. Chemistry researchers are in a dire need for some sane programing skills, I can tell you...
My PhD work required that I learn programming, I learned R. Now I'm starting to learn Python in addition to R.
There's plenty of opportunities for someone who is a programmer that is interested in science, where I'm sitting. I just hired an MS level employee who had experience modeling but not with programming. I'm looking to hire one programmer to do some R package work for me shortly and another to do some "big data" sort of work. However, it's not always easy to find someone to fill these positions who has enough science background or interest.
Depending on your interests and skills, there are jobs that would definitely suit you. A general programming skill with a general interest in science can net you some interesting positions.
I worked as a research assistant for a professor for six years. It was a great job. The most rewarding part is that I worked on lots of different projects and most of them were cool and intellectually stimulating and fun. It was also fantastic going to conferences and presenting work. You can really push and challenge yourself. It feels a bit like working in a startup. Each professor has their own team and budget and grants and publications, so its like being part of a small company, except that there is a big institution providing backing and benefits. Will your work change the world to be a better place? That's often not so clear cut in academia, but it is certainly a tremendous opportunity for growth and development, and there is demand for computer programming in research.
Professors tend to be incredibly busy so they are looking for self-starters, people who can just get on and contribute without lots of supervision. If you want to get into this area of work, more than academic qualifications, what you need is to demonstrate your own ability to make things. Demo or die. For fields like bio research there's lots of use of small sensors and data capture devices, so one suggestion is to make your own Arduino or Rasberry project, to show that you can come up with a cool idea and have the passion to see it through from start to completion.
Academia is a two tier system, professors and then everyone else. Professors have full control over their research efforts. Researchers don't. After a while as a researcher you will start having your own ideas about where you think the research direction should go, and then you will encounter a glass ceiling about how far you can take this. There's no real career advancement path, so at that point you are stuck.
To address this, make it part of your plan from the outset to enroll in a part time degree program while you are working as a researcher. Most universities offer tuition remission for employees, so as you work you can also get a degree for a heavily discounted fee. Its an entitlement in many full time research assistant posts, but make sure to check this before you start. Any professor you would want to work for will immediately agree to help you figure this out, especially if the degree you want to do is in an area that is relevant to the research. That degree represents your exit strategy, either into full academia, or into a job beyond it, don't procrastinate.
Wow, makes me wish I was starting all over again!
All Science is computer science nowadays, and I'm not even a computer scientist. So yes, there are many fields that are in great need of computer scientists and/or programmers. For example this guy, who popularized the term "connectome":
http://hebb.mit.edu/people/seung/
And BTW, his excellent TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_seung.html
Research is not just academic: there is a lot of research going on in biotech, pharmaeceuticals, defense, aerospace, and government. There are also think tanks and the like, which probably crunch a lot of numbers. In most cases, research laboratories and institutes are anchored near major universities.
I would suggest you relocate to a geographic area where a lot of research gets done. Boston, DC, and the Research Triangle spring to mind, but that's because I live on the East Coast. Los Angeles County has Caltech and UCLA so that is probably a safe bet on the West Coast. I'm sure there are others. Any state capital will have its public health, environmental, and similar agencies located there.
Try a location-specific search of the job listings for one of these areas (with loose technical criteria and strict geographic criteria) and you'll get a good idea of what jobs are out there and what skills they're looking for.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
If you peruse the scientific publications of your interest (mainly geology?), note the various authors' affiliations - in addition to universities/colleges, some will be from government agencies and/or their contractor companies. That will give you a good starting point to ask around about openings and/or other companies doing similar work.
I've been working 20+ years for a contracting company, doing space science data analysis and research for a government agency. Projects change every so often (keeping things interesting!), and I get co-authorships on the occasional publication. While my Bachelors degree is in *solid earth* Geophysics (+ unofficial CS minor), the strong programming skills with a math/science background has worked out very well for my situation. Hope it does for you also.
If you could see yourself liking biology, we're at the point where DNA sequencing of (micro-)organisms is becoming super cheap. You could get into writing software for analysing DNA sequences. There's going to be a need for software capable of handling many whole genome sequences in a short amount of time. There are currently both open- and closed-source options, so you could go either route.
If you want to get an idea if that sort of programming would appeal to you, there's a free online set of problems called "ROSALIND" (http://rosalind.info/about/), which teaches the biology alongside getting you to develop your own solutions to the posed bioinformatics questions (in any programming language you like).
You sound a great deal like me, and -- speaking from personal experience -- what you want is possible. :-) I'd look within NASA, definitely.
And ignore the bitter folks here who are whining about how they're looked down upon by the PhDs. That's certainly not a universal experience -- I have coded for PhDs at a couple of research institutions and always got along well with them. Just remember that you have to give respect to get respect, especially if you're the new kid in the lab.
You'd probably want/need the edge of a Masters in the research-related field, more than a Masters in Comp Sci. People will value you more if you have solid footing in both the programming domain and the problem domain.
Final bit of advice: don't hide your passion about wanting to work for the betterment of humanity. I have been upfront about that in my interviews, and it always resonates with the right people. Many of those PhDs in the sciences have similar passions.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Scientific Research Positions For Programmers?
Those are few in existence. Unfortunately (and I speak from former experience) a B.S. degree in CS with experience exclusively in the "enterprise" does not lead itself to any research/R&D position of the sort. Plus, research and R&D positions typically go to positions titled as "engineers" or "architects", not programmers. Every good software engineer or architect is a programmer, and any good programmer is an engineer or architect. But sadly, labels rule the world, pigeonholing people in stupid, mutually exclusive roles.
My suggestion is to go back to academia and get a graduate degree. Aim to do research associated with (or funded by) a company. Establish connections. Concurrently to that effort, or after that, go work with a true software engineering firm (say Google.) Aim high. Or, go into a defense or aeronautics company (Lockheed Martin Missile Divisions or Boeing.) Avoid defense contractors that specialize in "integration". Aim for the companies or divisions that actually do cool shit. For this later type of company, a graduate degree in Computer Engineering would be more helpful than CS alone (I'm a CS grad btw, so I'm talking from experiencing my lack of a hardware background.)
Once there (be it in the commercial or defense sectors), aim high, and keep studying, build your connections, and seek out to work with R&D programs. You want to move to a position of responsibility and become a subject-matter expert in something. You want to aim to a position that does research or architecture. That's where scientific/R&D positions exist.
Either or going all the way to a Ph.D. Though I'm not sure that's what you really want.
So get an MS in Geology. You will find:
1) you will be supported. I.e. people in the department or even unrelated departments will hire you as a student. They do it partly because they need your skills, partly because they truly want to see you succeed, people in academia like to see people succeed, and partly as a of self interest; if they hire you then if one of their students needs a job your adviser might hire them. Sort of a mutual support mechanism as well as professional courtesy. But what you will get is a well rounded education, references, and something for the CV.
This is based on my experiences. I never went without a job while pursuing my MS, and had a job when I graduated.
Also, I distrust anyone programming in a technical field like Geology without background knowledge. Sure the person might right great code, but is it the *right* code? Without domain knowledge they may go down the wrong road.
The sciences need great programmers. I had a great experience doing it. So go for it.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Your best options will be with government labs and government affiliated research organizations (e.g. JPL, Sandia, JHUAPL).
The scientific community is really coalescing around Python. I started working at UCSD-SIO in 2004 and sold my whole team on Python. In that time I've seen Python emerge as the accross the board standard in most research institutions. Although there's still heaps of legacy code written in Perl, C, Fortran, tcl, tcsh, insert language here, and there's always the holdout who will keep writing matlab code until you pry it out of his cold dead hands, so being a multilinguist helps.
You see some programming jobs related to seismics (which is a branch of geology) pop up here from time to time http://www.iris.edu/hq/employment
You'll find some oceaongraphy related programming jobs pop up here from time to time. Note some of them require going to sea. You'll find marine geophysicists do a lot of seismics and geology: http://unols.org/jobs/jobs/index.html
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
You might be lucky to get a position in a research institute and/or university, but without at least a masters degree that will be very difficult. My advice? Apply for a graduate program in your chosen field. With a doctorate, or at the least a masters degree, your chances are much higher to achieve your goals, though success is never guaranteed! :-)
Good luck!
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Right now one of the easier fields to break into with only a Bachelors degree is bioinformatics and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA is always looking for programmers to come work for them in the various cancer research groups. As the others have already pointed out though, in research there is a ceiling in place if you don't have a Ph.D and realistically a research-based (i.e. thesis) Master's degree is going to be needed if you actually want to have career progression somewhere without having the Ph.D since there are enough people with them being graduated these days.
Look into getting a PhD or at least an MS in the science you're interested in. In my (pretty limited, admittedly) experience, the developers who do the heavy lifting on scientific codes are PhDs. At the same time, very few (almost 0) freshly minted science or engineering PhDs have any experience developing software in a production environment, so as long as you aren't terrible at interviewing, I think you'd be a shoe-in at a national lab or a company that does this kind of work after you finish.
FYI, because you probably don't know this, getting a PhD in a hard science or engineering is usually free (to you). In fact, they even pay you to do it. The stipend will be a half or a third or a quarter of what you're making now, but it's enough to live on. The challenge of course is that with little or no educational background in geology or whatever, it's going to be harder, though not impossible, to get into a good PhD program. At the very least, they will expect you to take a few undergraduate courses in the beginning to give you the baseline knowledge that most of your classmates will arrive with. And I would urge you to shoot for a top 10 or 20 department. On the BS level, where you got your degree doesn't matter much (again, in my experience). Where you get your PhD matters a lot more. Of all places, academia should be a meritocracy, but in reality, people with PhDs can be really petty about these things, and your lineage matters. At the very least, many places that would hire someone like you only directly recruit at a limited number of schools, and those schools tend to be the best ones.
Another thing you might consider to help you get around this lack of science background is applying to an applied math program that has a scientific emphasis. I had a friend at The University of Texas who was in the computational science and applied math program there, and his research was about computational fluid dynamics. Maybe dig around on their website, or the websites of similar programs, to see if any of the faculty have research collaborations with geologists.
Unfortunately, research groups that use R are often unwilling to commit the time and the expertise to their programming needs. R is a decent enough language, but it scales very badly with problem size and architecture complexity. Thankfully, plenty of other research groups have committed to using C or Fortran, with drastically better results. Those C/Fortran groups will be much nicer for an trained programmer to work in. My main point is the difference in work environments. An R lab will give you a lot of headaches because your coworkers may not understand a lot of important low-level programming issues. Plus, your work will grind as your problem complexity increases -- and that's always frustrating. A C or Fortran lab will be more likely to be understand any programming issues you bring to them, and you won't have that complexity ceiling constantly looming over your head. (This is based on my experience as a scientific programmer for the past 10 years).
If your goal is to contribute to the "betterment of humanity" then I suggest you join the open-source community. You can probably make a bigger difference in that area then to try and find a job in the scientific community. It also sounds like your current placement may not be the best fit. Look for a job in the IT department of a University or at a company that embraces Open-Source. For instance I work at Novell, sister company to Suse Linux and the "corporate culture" is very different from the Insurance company I worked at before. Suse strongly encourages involvement in the open-source community. I think you just need to find a job that fits your personality better. Lucky for you, demand for good software engineers is high.
If you want to get into research the most direct path is to get into a Ph.D. program in the discipline that interests you. It is the most direct path because a) you'll have to do publishable research to graduate, and b) most research positions in academia and industry require a Ph.D. If you can't afford the time or money of a Ph.D. program, find a masters program with research option. While in grad school there are a few skills you must acquire: * Research experience. * Awarness of your area of research. What are the big unsolved computational problems? Make your PhD research in one of the hot areas. Learn how to find out what's the next big thing so that you can be on the cutting edge. * Publishing and conference presentations (learn to sell yourself). * Networking in your field (best jobs come from knowing someone in a position to help you).
I'm currently a masters-level scientific programmer at Argonne National Lab, and I've worked on projects in population genetics (previous jobs) and nuclear physics (current job). Overall, the opportunities are great. Here's my advice, in response to several other comments:
Re: the pay level.
At any level -- BS, MS, or Ph.D. -- scientific programmers are among the most highly compensated scientists. Obviously, few scientists are as highly-compensated as their counterparts in industry. However, the wages are still very very good, and I don't consider it a reason to look the other way.
Re: the grant cycle.
A few comments have mentioned that scientists work on 2 to 5 year grants. While that's true, it usually doesn't mean that your job will expire after 2 to 5 years. Your research group will always be pursuing new grants. So you will usually get to keep the same job and be moved to another grant.
Re: the languages.
If your strength is Java/ big data tools, I highly recommend exploring options in informatics. There's the most opportunities in biological and medical informatics (I worked in bioinformatics for several years; I used a lot of MySQL with the UCSC genome browser; and a lot of Java with the Broad Instiutute's Genome Analysis Toolkit). But if geophysics is your thing, there's definitely integrative analysis to be done in that field too.
Re: how to pick an institution
I think you should definitely give preference to an institution that has a teraflop or petaflop supercomputer. You don't want to be stuck writing R for some postdoc's iMac. Look through top500.org to get some leads (but don't forget University of Illinois, who had the stones to eschew the LINPACK benchmarks and isn't listed). An institution that has committed that amount of hardware will be more willing to commit resources to its programmers.
Overall, don't sell yourself short; you have desperately needed skills. :)
Think of how you could change the world by creating iPhone apps that make cat sounds.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
I suspect you haven't studied much history since what most people think of "business" in the modern standpoint is only a couple hundred years old. Most of your examples have more to do with "trade" as opposed to "business" per se. Trade and trading has ways been around and is an effective aspect of human survival, but business in itself is not necessary for human survival.
The US government spends billions of dollars on research each year and much of it requires software development to some degree. Much of this money goes to the big guys like Boeing or Lockheed Martin, but a non-trivial portion of it is reserved for small companies as well. In any case, there are lots of programming jobs out there doing research, either directly or indirectly, for the government.
I happen to work for a small company that does contract research and software development for the gov't. We pride ourselves on writing solid, maintainable scientific software. To accomplish this goal, we need programmers and scientists, but most of all we need programmer-scientists. We are hiring (message me if you want more info), but I'm sure there are other companies out there as well.
sHi
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes, your experience is universal and the vast majority of employers aren't evil money-grubbing bastards that will screw you at every opportunity, no matter what the industry.
Oh, wait..
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I see a few mentions of FORTRAN, but they're all modded low. I've been working as a researchers/roll-your-own-code programmers for 40 years now. I've written so much FORTRAN code over that period that I pretty much dream in FORTRAN. Yeah, I'm a dinosaur. Anyway, if you want to do serious research support work you should learn FORTRAN in general and HPF (High-Performance FORTRAN) in particular. If you're any kind of a decent programmer you should be able to pick this up fairly easily, but for street cred in the scientific research computer-support business you'd better get some FORTRAN chops.
I had the same reasons as you have, though in my case, it was a disillusionment due to solving the same problems over and over again, with the solid knowledge that the kind of problems asked of me would be very similar in future too. I started with a bachelor's, and stayed in the industry working at one of the large behemoths for 10 years. When I realised that I am getting disillusioned, I took my masters via one of the universities offering remote campus, which gave me some confidence that I actually liked what I was planning to do. Once my masters was complete, I resigned, and got into a university for my Ph.D. in my chosen field. I am on my third year now, to hopefully finish in another three. I hope to either join a research institution or stay with academics as a professor after completion. What I can offer you advice is that, be sure of what you want, and where you want it. Life in gradschool is very different from life in the industry, with different demands. I particularly feel that a Ph.D. feels like working in a startup, with you on the look out for opportunities, and once realized, having to move very fast to do the research before it is taken up by others.
~561
No, if you like your job, and your boss knows it, he/she knows that he/she doesn't have to work as hard to keep you happy and productive. Ergo, they don't have to pay you as much to keep you.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
The language of choice is highly dependent on the field. I currently work at a mechatronics R&D company. Most of my colleagues are mechanical engineers. Matlab has some kind of God status to them. Personally I'm a big fan of Python (my background is in machine learning / AI) which seems to be an emerging language in many scientific fields.
"don't have to" != "will not"
I suppose it must depend on the industry, but I've found that someone who **likes** what they do is far more productive than someone whose primary interest is drawing a paycheck and my bosses have been VERY interested in keeping me happy.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Go read my free on-line textbooks --Jon Claerbout, Stanford University
Whoops - wasn't logged in.... this was me...
For 8 years I worked as a "Compuational Scientist" at 3 university supercomputing centers, helping students and faculty to use/program parallel computers. I don't have a PhD.
I saw several kinds of computing staff in academia. Some assist in research; most don't. They are:
- graduate students (CS, engineering, physical sciences, psychology, medical research, etc)
- post docs (w/ same areas of research)
- IT support staff (cluster or workstation or network admins, univ administrative app programmers, etc)
- research support staff (usu. project-based, paid for by a professor / lab, lasts as long as the contract, usually 1-3 years)
The exception to the above roles is the permanent staff research programmer (at large specialized computing centers or univs with large labs within engineering departments). These are funded for longer cycles (usually 4-5 years), and have numerous executive staff who do nothing but maintain the flow of funds. Examples: NCSA, Texas Advanced Computing Center, San Diego Supercomputing Center, etc.
Many folks do make a living as an academic developer, but they tend to have a specialized skills (HPC / scientific computing, statistical analysis / data mining, data visualization, engineering, etc). Most such jobs do not require a PhD, but univ employers prefer to hire as advanced a degree as possible, especially if the research/work is likely to lead to academic papers. If you can't do that, your role will be marginalized (subordinate to the university's main mission of granting degrees and writing papers).
The ideal research programmer can perform like a research scientist -- find their own funding, write their own research proposals, collaborate with other people's research projects, etc. Sometimes this work extends to US gov't SBIR projects (small business investigative research), which often bleeds over into US military contract work. If you can help to write your own ticket, you can remain working in academia indefinitely. If not, you will need to look for a new research position every 2-4 years.
Personally, I think the two best reasons to get an academic IT job are: 1) to be on-campus for just long enough to finish a grad degree, or 2) to settle into a low-stress long-term IT support job that offers a relaxed lifestyles and good benefits. From my experience, academic support jobs are not especially challenging or rewarding, and academic research jobs are generally narrow-focused and short-lived.
I am a healthcare research programmer at a policy research institute. I work as part of a research team to help improve the public well-being via data acquisition, processing, and analysis. The data I work with is big (think up to billions of records), messy, and incredibly complex; the work I do is challenging and rewarding. On a given day, for example, I might analyze quality of life data for individuals who participate in a program that allows them to move out of an institutional care setting and into the community; wrangle hundreds of millions of Medicare claims records into a coherent whole to allow us to study the possibility of a bundled payment initiative; or crunch school meal data as part of a project analyzing children’s access to nutritious food. Policy research programming is a booming field and we can hardly find enough qualified people to hire. For us, qualified might mean as little as six months of solid programming experience in any industry plus a genuine interest in working in a research environment serving the public good. If you feel that you might be qualified, definitely feel free to apply to any of the openings at Mathematica Policy Research here: https://careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/client_mathematica/external/search.do.
Make sure you really enjoy the research you'll be doing, because moving from a private programming position into an academic research programming position is going to come with a hefty pay cut.
Unfortunately for my wallet, I *do* enjoy the research quite a bit and have co-authored more publications than most junior faculty PhDs, so it can be very rewarding in a non-monetary way.
Though as others have said, if you're goal is to be conceiving of and performing your own research, you need to go through the typical channels of getting a PhD, doing a post-doc, and eventually finding a position somewhere as a professor. The research programmer will always be a research programmer and won't be running their own research lab or anything like that. Though doing a few years of research in a field can be a great way to get experience and figure out what you're interested in before going to grad school if you do want to go the academic route.
Argonne National Laboratory (and maybe some of the other DOE labs) have "Pre-doc" positions. These are for college grads who are thinking of going to graduate school in a couple of years, the pay is not bad and it gives you a chance to see what research looks like from the bottom up. For some reason they don't advertise them very well. You can look around the research projects at mcs.anl.gov and then contact directly scientists involved in areas of interest to you and inquire about pre-doc positions.
There are other venues for research besides the joining a school's research program. You can do research independently as yourself and then show it off at conventions. Hacker conventions like DEF CON are particularly good venues for the research oriented developer.
All trade is business and all business is trade, idiot.
All businesses may engage in some form of trade, but not all trade is business. The difference is that business is conducted between organized groups of individuals (i.e. chartered companies) where as trade can be conducted as the group or individual level.
Maybe you should study some Roman history - corporations, interest rates - these things have been around far longer than a couple of hundred years.
Alright, you get a half point since Roman collegia do share some properties with the modern chartered companies that I was thinking of. The chartered companies date to 17th century though, so my point still stands. One of the key features of modern corporations is that they can fail but the individual assets of the participates in that corporation are protected.
There are, indeed, scientific programmers. Consider environmental companies - they do a lot of engineering, in terms of finding and catagorizing and cataloging pollution. Or there are some engineering firms - think of aerospace. Or there's the biosciences, which are big these days. We have a lot of such programmers here (I work for a US federal contractor in the health and human services area[1]). In my division, we've got folks working on things like protein folding[2], which takes *days* on a good-sized compute cluster. Fun stuff.
And for the liberidiots, "making money for folks who are already rich, but are desperate to get richer" is not doing a damn thing for the human race[3]. nor for the economy[4].
mark
1. Which shall remain nameless; anything I say should not be construed as speaking for my employer, my agency, the US federal government, or the view out of my window (assuming I even had a window).
2. The code we use was written by one of our researchers, and is used around the agency.
3. Given the massive relocation of wealth upwards, and the documented downwards movement of everyone
below the 1%, with the only new jobs "created" being sweat shops in places like Bangladesh, and minimum wage
"service sector" jobs here, this is a demonstrable fact.
4. krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/john-galt-and-the-theory-of-the-firm/
You should consider pursuing an advanced degree in Statistics. The skills you'd learn can be applied to nearly any research or data analysis programming position.
Ryan
You're right, but not for the reason you think.
And what's really amusing is that you'll never know why.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yes, it is realistic with your qualifications.
Look for Big Data projects. Particularly in Physics (e.g. CERN), Astronomy (the new generation of instruments which will be coming onliny in the next few years are going to be churning out Terabytes of data per night, which cannot be analyzed in any way other than automatically - look at projects like LSST, organisations like ESO, or the Virtual Observatory projects around the world - look at the IVOA for an overview). Or Biology/Biochemistry/Medicine - Medical Imaging (e.g. MRI), Genomics. Medicine is often a good one because unlike physicists, doctors rarely have the computing/programming skills. Geology needs data analysis for seismic surveys etc, but there the money is in the oil/gas companies - though the research environment there is just as nice as anywhere else.
Java is used quite widely, as is C and C++, Python is also increasingly used with the various libraries which are now available - SciPy, NumPy etc.
You might find yourself on a short-term contract at first (a year or two or the duration of the grant) but once you get in the door it's usually possible to migrate into renewed contracts, or a PhD programme etc.
You didn't say where you are based, but look around at what your local university or nearby labs are doing in the fields I mentioned. Or oil/gas/mineral companies.
No, if you like your job, and your boss knows it, he/she knows that he/she doesn't have to work as hard to keep you happy and productive.
This is only true if you won't be just as happy doing a similar job elsewhere. My experience is that, in the long run, passionate and enthusiastic employees do a lot better financially than 9-5ers.
You can do that as long as your boss knows your passion and enthusiasm would work just as well for someone else, and you remind them of it constantly. Otherwise, bend over.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I have had great fun as a computer person for astronomical observatories. Have been treated quite well without the PhD, but there is certainly a ceiling without one.
The Square Kilometre Array is the current hotness, and is hiring.
http://www.skatelescope.org/people-contacts/jobs/
Awwww, to be naive and idealistic. That is what I thought!! I have worked for the big corps, and yes they are evil but then they don't pretend to be anything else. They are out for the money, period. I thought ok I will endeavor to work for the greater good being a programmer at a cancer research center in the NW. OMG, what an eye opener that was. Worked there for over four years. Guess what, researchers only care about money!! They will do anything and everything to get and keep their grants. Backstabbing other reseachers is the norm, they might get the grant instead of me. And I mean anything. I went to upper management to complain about a researcher fabricating data, two days later I was told I no longer had a job. Another very attractive lady complained the researchers was grouping her. She complained to upper management. She was axed!! Turned out the reseacher had multi-million grant, protect the $$$. I ran into her after she was fired. I was still working there. I told if she wanted to take them to court I would be glad to testify in her behalf. She said she just wanted to be away from the hell hole. And it gets worse. Lying to patients about treatments that got them killed. IT WAS AND REMAINS THE EVILEST PLACE I HAVE EVER WORKED!! Sure the are some good researchers but there are a hell of lot of the kind above in comparison. It's really sad. The major disappointment of my career.
PhD in physical chemistry, theory. All my research experience was computation. A full time coder is a huge asset in a computation research group. They quickly become versed in the sorts of things they need to know - science wise - and contribute in that way. Really, how can you write code to solve a problem you don't understand? They are part of the group, actively participate in research, and are acknowledged with authorship. And since their tenure isn't limited by graduation, the next postdoc, or a professorship, they quickly become the most senior members of the group. If they have a PhD, they will become an assistant professor. However, these positions are very rare. As it's been pointed out, very few groups are large enough to support a full time programmer.
46 & 2
I am currently working in a US university as a post doc and will join another one as assistant professor. And I can tell you that one thing we definitely lack are programmers. We need programmer and we hire them. My current department (biomedical informatics at OSU) already employ at least 2 full time programmers. And they are useful. I am currently "in charge" of a piece of middleware that is quite useful for parallel programming, but it is not production ready. And provided the time I have to spare to work on it (probably negative time), it is not going to be ready anytime soon.
And frankly, close to noting of the software I write is production ready, we still release it as open source because it is useful for some other researcher, but it could definitely use some ironing.
So yes, there is definitely work. Now the question is "Are there funds for you?" The answer to that question varies a lot in time. But frequently when writting research grant, we include programmer time in the budget. So there is money for programmers.
I'm just an undergrad, so I can't claim any expertise is career options, but I as a cognitive science major, I am doing research in designing neural networks that mimic human learning (both at the behavioral and neuronal level). Not only is it contributing to that field, but my professor plans to use this research to better model autism and develop better ways to diagnose it early and to treat it after it's identified. I find it very rewarding to be a part of such an endeavor. As for the programming side of things, we primarily use MATLAB since the code we are building off of was written in that and it makes working with lots of very large matrices easy, however there has been talk of switching to Python due to the proprietary nature of MATLAB. I have heard from many people (professors and students) that computational cognitive neuroscience (which encompasses everything from learning algorithms to brain controlled prosthetics) is going to become a hot field of research (think lots of funding) in the coming years. Keep in mind this is just hearsay though, and can't truly speak to the veracity of such claims... Perhaps other slashdotters will know more about the field... I just know I feel the same way about spending my working hours doing something to make the world a better place :-)
The job of a scientist is to discover what nature intended. The job of an engineer is to politely disagree.
You presume my perspective is stupid when it was pretty clearly not.
Let me clarify the situation for you.
The goat herd tending his flock 2000 years ago was a businessmen. He was out there every day busting his ass protecting that herd from predators, thieves, the elements, and the stupidity of the live stock itself.
Why did he do it? To feed his family. To provide for his community. To make a profit.
That is business.
You can hate on it all you like but its life. Without business we're dead.
Now you want to say you're only against modern business and not some idealized and naive conception of older business models? Its the same thing really. The means are more complicated and organized. 2000 years ago you wouldn't be able to travel 2000 miles, show up for a want ad, and get a job on the basis of references or credentials. Businesses then were much smaller because they couldn't grow. They literally couldn't maintain cohesion beyond a certain size.
Today we have huge corporations because we CAN. And that unfortunately subordinates us systems of organization instead of human relationships which was the old model's basis.
You might prefer human relationships. In all honestly, I think I prefer them too. But they're less efficient and less capable of dealing with large organizations. Its the difference between the city and the villiage.
Do you hate cities? Because they're very much the same thing as big business is to small business. As you scale up you get more informal and more systematic. You don't know everyone's name. The personal relationships stop governing interpersonal relations and the RULES start to become the most important thing.
Love it or hate it. This is how we feed ourselves.
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So chartered companies are bad but individuals running businesses is good?
There is no ethical difference. The only difference is that psychologically some people have a hard time relating to impersonal organizations.
But the same thing can be said of cities or national governments.
Why don't we have a chieftain that knows each and every one of us by name? Why do we accept leaders that might not have ever come within 100 miles of us in our entire lives?
Grasp that corporations are not evil. They're just impersonal. And they're impersonal because frequently they're not dealing with people they know well. Keep all business between known associates and things follow an older pattern. There are human relationships. But allow a structured organization to interact with an almost random collection of customers, venders, and other assorted people... and very quickly the most important thing will be the system because at that point the system will be the only thing keeping anything together.
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The goat herd [sic] tending his flock 2000 years ago was a businessmen. He was out there every day busting his ass protecting that herd from predators, thieves, the elements, and the stupidity of the live stock itself.
No, he was a tradesman and there might not have been any profit motive involved depending upon the size of the herd and how remote the individual was from a center of trade.
Now you want to say you're only against modern business and not some idealized and naive conception of older business models?
I never said that and you should go back and re-read my comments if you don't believe me. I said that business in and of itself is not necessary for human survival which is a true statement. Trade and businesses might help to ensure human survival is easier, but they aren't necessary from that standpoint.
So chartered companies are bad but individuals running businesses is good?
Again, I never said that chartered companies were bad. You keep trying to read a percived bias into very short comments.
Although since you bring up the question of ethics, I would argue that there is an ethical difference since an individual can be held responsible for their actions but a large organization cannot. Although that is a very long discussion in and of itself and it's one that people have been arguing back and forth for a long time now.
well, you'll probably need to live near a research university, of course. then you have to accept that you won't be making a fortune, but you'll probably do OK.
there are a couple of different paths; if you want to stay with the Java/C++ type thing, you'll be more on the programming side of things, or you could pick up a statistical/analytic language like SAS or SPSS and get less involved with the nuts and bolts and more involved with the actual data munching. even take a few steps into statistical analysis, if you want to go that way.
another route, especially if you've picked up SAS, is to go into a drug company. i don't know about all of them, but my experience has been that the data and analysis side of things is honest work. money is way better than academics
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Large organizations can be held accountable if you can show that members of that company broke the law.
What you cannot hold accountable are shareholders. Their liability is limited to their investment.
Would you hold a little old lady that invested in an oil company criminally accountable should the oil company do something criminal? Obviously not. However, if a member of that company can be proven to have done something criminal then you can absolutely hold him accountable.
When people whine about not being able to hold companies accountable for actions it is a misunderstanding as to how corporations work. Shareholders are protected because they simply don't have enough to do with actual decisions to be held accountable. People physically there physically doing a criminal act though? Totally prosecutable.
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The only difference between a tradesman and a businessmen is degree. They're in the same boat.
As to profit motive, everyone wants something better for their family. Possibly he's just subsisting but is subsistence ethically superior then seeking to better yourself? I don't see how that makes any sense.
The point is... these institutions and systems are very old. The current versions are more evolved but they're basically very similar... its reptiles versus birds. Both need to eat and raise their young. You do that or die.
If you don't produce more in your generation then was produced in the previous generation then the population will stagnate or your population will starve.
If the population increases AND people don't starve then it means we've increased production... which means someone is making a profit in capital if nothing else.
As to business not being essential... Only if we wanted to live like animals. Human society... with a human population anything like what we have now requires business.
Tell you what sport... you hate business? Get off the internet. Never use electricity again. Take off any clothes you didn't personally make out of raw materials you didn't personally gather.
And walk off into nature. Enjoy life without commerce.
If you don't die or die out through failing to reproduce... what will your descendants look like in 50,000 years? And what will mine look like if continue in society?
Its rather obvious that society is an advantage and commerce is essential for it. So rather then belly aching the essential... would you rather suggest ways to improve the system so its better without destroying us all?
Just a suggestion.
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Do you mind elaborating? If you honestly found software enjoyable (and presumably you had a decent lifestyle and good hours, or could have found it) why did you leave it for medicine?
Do you regret it? Have you been able to use any skills from your previous life in your new career?
I'm facing a similar choice. Thanks.
What with oil possibly on the way out or on the way down, employment long-term might be narrowing in geology, over the decades.
But one computer-intensive area seems to be on the way up: Bioinformatics. More data, more processing, more algorithms to be invented, an endless supply of medical and biological research problems. Also, more different languages in use. Even Google has a bioinformatics research program.
Either way, though, you'd be better off with a masters degree of some kind.
There's a reason that several universities offer a masters in bioinformatics. There are offerings in geomatics, but they don't seem to be targeted directly at geology. At least on the first Google page.
I18N == Intergalacticization
Many labs do need programmers, and some of them are even starting to realize it (I've seen some profs who thought a normal biology student could start programming on complex projects with just a bit of training). As many had said, language will vary with lab and domain - python is a favorite, with some labs holding out to matlab, etc. The hardest thing to do is find the right lab. You're going to have a better chance to get hired by one of the larger/better funded labs (they have more money for positions that are pure science). A normal job website might not have all of these sorts of postings, check with your local academic departments. Programming in a lab is nice in a lot of ways: more flexibility, usually a lot of control over your projects, good atmosphere (mostly). However a few caveats: the pay isn't nearly as good in industry, and you need to work independently - most labs don't have many (if any) programmers so when you get stuck you're on your own. Our lab (neuroscience) is actually looking for programmers right now (python required, and we're just outside Munich) - lots of active projects - email if interested.