But the other things depend what you work on and where. If it's cancer or food security, the funding is there and not going away. And you can choose how direct the outcomes are by choosing the position.
I'm not saying everyone should do it, but if you're good enough to breeze into highly paid positions at top tech companies, you're good enough to get a really interesting position in computational biology.
Yeah, it can be interesting but often times it's almost the same sort of thing as any lousy computing job on a day to day basis, it just pays worse, with weird academic attitudes and bureaucracy tacked on. Plus, when I did it you were stuck using some janky Perl scripts and whatever bogus Java package was promising to replace the perl scripts of the day.
I worked in a lab at HMS that sounded interesting on paper but wasn't all that interesting in practice. The researchers did the same stuff as you would at The Office, they checked ESPN.com, went to meetings, typed in some SQL and Perl codes for a while, went on coffee break, complain about something, go to another meeting, fart around with the design of their conference poster, etc ad nauseum. Then they all just went to go work at some big corporation, anyway. The upside was low expectations so I was able to work almost full time as a contractor on something interesting at the same time.
That sounds tedious, but it's not my experience. People do leave to work at big corporations because the stress and relatively low pay of academia drives them to it. But the work here is pretty exciting.
But the other things depend what you work on and where. If it's cancer or food security, the funding is there and not going away. And you can choose how direct the outcomes are by choosing the position.
I'm not saying everyone should do it, but if you're good enough to breeze into highly paid positions at top tech companies, you're good enough to get a really interesting position in computational biology.