100% agree. I look around my office sometimes and wonder, what are we doing?! The skill of juggling terabytes of data then slicing and dicing it to order is massively transferrable to almost any problem domain. As is the skill of getting thousands of processors to work together. And we are using for something that is ultimately frivolous.
Like you I am a hypocrite in that I know this and I do what I do anyway. But it's only partly for the money; the other part is there just aren't the jobs to do this out there. A lab or whatever would rather have a grad student hack something up on the side than hire professional developers (and fair play to them, they've discovered a way to get smart people to work for peanuts, but with the best will in the world, someone who got into this to be a biologist is going to see administering a database or whatever as a chore that gets in the way of their real work, and they're not going to do a fraction as well as a professional).
someone who got into this to be a biologist is going to see administering a database or whatever as a chore that gets in the way of their real work, and they're not going to do a fraction as well as a professional
What about techies doing pro-bono work. I interviewed with a group associated with the human genome thing, and one of the biologists was bragging about using a stack -- as if that was some sort of hyper-uber-esoteric data structure.
Do you remember that recent scandal at the CRU, when people wanted to verify their dubious findings and they'd "lost" the data? Now maybe they did delete it to cover up falsifying their conclusions, I don't know. Or maybe they just didn't have a clue about IT and no-one was paying attention to the backups.
Like you I am a hypocrite in that I know this and I do what I do anyway. But it's only partly for the money; the other part is there just aren't the jobs to do this out there. A lab or whatever would rather have a grad student hack something up on the side than hire professional developers (and fair play to them, they've discovered a way to get smart people to work for peanuts, but with the best will in the world, someone who got into this to be a biologist is going to see administering a database or whatever as a chore that gets in the way of their real work, and they're not going to do a fraction as well as a professional).