I got really bored working on e-commerce checkout funnels and A/B testing and constantly learning about new Javascript frameworks that churn out every year that does the same things over and over. With Coding Bootcamp churning out more CRUD people year by year, and JS frameworks and Agile automating web dev work to be like assembly-line; I found it to be both increasingly less financially secure and spiritually filling.
Genomics (for me personally) is more interesting; you get to learn a lot of statistics, biology and backend pipeline code. Also work environment in a lab is different, you have a lot more autonomy and you get to present your work and learn more about things in an academic/journal club/talks setting vs. the typical IT/Software Agile morning standup's. Not to mention the field is constantly changing, new sequencing technologies and new search algorithms are published constantly.
The salary for post-doc's is at that range. A research scientist or a software developer at least if you land at a well-funded place or BigPharma is about the same as a software developer (100-130K). I got out of the web-dev game a year ago; and I think while I am no longer on the cutting edge of the latest React.js/Node technology, I picked up new skills in concurrency, messaging system and machine learning (HMM, SVM, clustering etc) building whole genome annotation/analysis pipelines.
It has worked out for my personality but I have plenty of friends who get excited about doing new iOS and JS languages/frameworks so I respect that too (but not for me).
I got really bored working on e-commerce checkout funnels and A/B testing and constantly learning about new Javascript frameworks that churn out every year that does the same things over and over. With Coding Bootcamp churning out more CRUD people year by year, and JS frameworks and Agile automating web dev work to be like assembly-line; I found it to be both increasingly less financially secure and spiritually filling.
Genomics (for me personally) is more interesting; you get to learn a lot of statistics, biology and backend pipeline code. Also work environment in a lab is different, you have a lot more autonomy and you get to present your work and learn more about things in an academic/journal club/talks setting vs. the typical IT/Software Agile morning standup's. Not to mention the field is constantly changing, new sequencing technologies and new search algorithms are published constantly.
The salary for post-doc's is at that range. A research scientist or a software developer at least if you land at a well-funded place or BigPharma is about the same as a software developer (100-130K). I got out of the web-dev game a year ago; and I think while I am no longer on the cutting edge of the latest React.js/Node technology, I picked up new skills in concurrency, messaging system and machine learning (HMM, SVM, clustering etc) building whole genome annotation/analysis pipelines.
It has worked out for my personality but I have plenty of friends who get excited about doing new iOS and JS languages/frameworks so I respect that too (but not for me).