undefined | Better HN

0 pointshenryaj11y ago0 comments

So depressing. This (and the parent comment) is the reason I didn't go into research -- it's a life of pipetting and manual labour that no-one's interested in automating, either because it's too complex or because labour is so cheap that there's no financial incentive to do so.

I'm happy to leave someone else to do that. I'd rather be in a job I actually enjoy the day-to-day of.

And that's to say nothing of the problems of PhDs: namely that there are ten times more PhD positions than there are postdoc positions. That ten-to-one crunch when it comes to finding a job sure does sound fun...

0 comments

ejstronge11y ago

With the utmost respect to you and the post you responded to, research is about answering questions to things you find interesting; for a biologist, pipetting is simply the means you take to get there.

If you want to contribute to Firefox or any other non-trivial open source project, you need to spend time creating a development environment and it likely will take weeks to months before you can make a substantive contribution.

If anyone is reading the comment I'm responding to or its parent comment, keep in mind that the manual labor is in pursuit of a goal.

innguest11y ago

I think your parent is alluding to the fact things could be automated in biological research but aren't because of the disincentives; and that at the same time things in tech are more amenable to automation and often parts of it are indeed automated.

Yes, it's all a means to an end, but how much time one wants to spend in the "means" (which can get extremely repetitive, apparently) is what counts for the parent (I'm supposing).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse