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Comment by flarg | Hacker News Reader

In life sciences the people are smarter than any developer but software is IT-captured so all they can work with is Excel. No code is meant for these people. Software developers will never deliver what life sciences needs without no code.

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I've watched life science people spend months manually clicking boxes in the tools they have, because they don't have a developer embedded in the team to write some 10-liner automation scripts. Same with stats, there are all kinds of systems like GraphPad Prism which try to bridge Excel and 'real' stats, where 30 lines of python and a CSV file would save them months.

More, they weren't even aware that these things could be improved. So no, I'm not convinced life science is intrinsically harder or the people there smarter. I attended some biochem and genetics classes at uni and once you have the foundations the concepts are actually pretty simple, there's just a lot of new terminology and random facts to memorize.

Agreed to some extent. "Life science" is quite broad so there's a wide range of topics with varying degrees of complexity and difficulty. I dipped my toes in various apects of life science during a biomedical engineering major. There are specialties overlapping with most traditional fields; from specialties comprising a large part of memorization like physiology, tissue engineering, and biochemistry (medicine), to hardcore organic synthesis (organic chem.), biomechanics (mechanical eng.), systems biology (control and graph theory), biosensors (physics, chem, biochem), imaging (CS::ML & physics), protein engineering/polymer science (chem, phys), bioinformatics (CS) which got me into CS/SE and programming, and many more.

Often there are multidisciplinary research teams and depending on how little a specialization already overlaps with CS/SE-ish topics, having at least someone who realizes which mundane stuff can be automated can be invaluable.

You think every single person in life sciences is smarter than every single developer?

Let me guess, you are one of the brilliant ones.

I've met some dim people in science research tracks.

If they are really that much smarter, why don't they code their own tools? It's not like there's a programming guild which enforces the monopoly held by certified software developers.

Hopefully one day...

I was once hired to do exactly that - develop real software to replace the weird hacks those life science folk built by themselves. Boy were they happy after that. So I guess your mileage will vary by lots.

IME the stronger labs have accepted the fact that software skills are key to their work, and embraced python, jupyter etc.

You should see the code they (we) write. Atrocious, archaic, sphagetti, words fail me.

Our microscope acquisition code is a single 25k LOC C file.

> In life sciences the people are smarter than any developer but software is IT-captured so all they can work with is Excel.

That's not really proving your point about them being "smarter than any developer". Lots of developers are smart enough to build their own tools.

"Software is IT captured"? What does that mean? You can have Python running and be creating software in an hour.

Life sciences people are generally far less intelligent than the average developer lol

I was a LS PhD, now I’m a developer. I can assure you that the average developer is far inferior to most PhD or post docs in any reputable university. Doesn’t mean they are absolutely smart though, I’d argue the biggest issue in research today is that there are a lot of not-that-smart-hustlers in it compared to what researhers used to be 60-100 years back.

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