Sorry if this isn’t the right place for this question but I couldn’t think of anywhere better to put it.

So I finished my degree in computer science a couple years ago right when the tech crash just started hitting, and the job market has been an enormous clusterfuck. Instead of trying to get a job where everyone seems to be going all-in on LLMs, machine learning, and crypto bullshit, I’d really like to be able to put my programming skills to good use helping out scientific research in some way, but I have no clue where to start. While in college I did help out my university’s biology research department by writing small programs here and there to help undergrad/grad students who weren’t very knowledgeable about technical solutions, but because of the recent funding cuts to scientific research and education, everyone there is struggling harder than I am.

Ideally I’d love to help contribute to causes that help improve people’s lives (or astronomy just because space is cool). Does anyone know of resources I could look into to start down this path?

  • zlatiah@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 day ago

    Is there a bright side?

    To be fair I might have exaggerated a bit… I can navigate my way around pretty advanced statistics/machine learning stuff, it’s just that I don’t have enough fundamentals to call myself a programmer; I assume most of my classmates are similar. But on the positive end, there are a lot more advanced methods in biomedical research now. People used a lot of cutting-edge machine learning in biomedical research (case in point: IBM and DeepMind had biomedicine in mind when they are trying to diss chess champions with AI models). Also there are some very competent programmers/research groups who ended up building open source bioinformatics tools that everyone could use, even though it seems against the hyper-competitive trend of biomedical research. So even if individual labs couldn’t do much, there are indeed better tools/pipelines available now

    Are there jobs out there?

    I… think a lot of research labs/pharmas are still pretty desperate for competent (or just any) bioinformaticians? Not in computational biology/methods development though, that field is too competitive even for me (and there are a surprisingly large amount of AI/ML/LLM slop)