I was thinking of going into that field. Can you expand a bit on why you left?
I spent 15 years trying to be a professor and failed miserably. I was bad at it and didn't like what professors have to do.
I then moved to industry to be a random engineer and thrived doing things entirely unrelated to drug discovery. Eventually, I convinced my company to invest heavily in life sciences. This was successful and I was on track to be a powerful player (a "research engineer", just like the DM folks who are building these things) in this space, when the project got very popular and I was elbowed aside by others who are more aggressive. So I went back to being a programmer again, it's much less stressful, pays better, and realistically, much of my time is just telling scientists what I would do if I was in their place anyway.
"Don't swim with the sharks if you don't like being bitten"
That sounds familiar. I guess they mostly don't listen, whatever your record -- especially if it was in a different field they could learn from -- but I hope it's not always like that.
They hide all of that under "I'm a scientist, you're not".
Tech (at its best) hates credentialism (sometimes I think to a point of over-correction).
That said, 80% of the devs in the bay area seem to have gone to Stanford or MIT, so...
