I was working at Azure and did some minor projects with the Microsoft Band. I decided I wanted to get into consumer bio tech. Then, the wife got a job in Hawaii and so we decided to move from Seattle for that. I expected there to be a lot of tech jobs in Hawaii, given its location in between Asia and North America. However, there are very few. Then I saw a post on Craigslist that the cancer center was looking to hire a software engineer. I had almost no biology experience but there are very few software engineers/data scientists here, so it ended up being a great fit. Took me about 9 months to be comfortable with the biology, and still am far from an expert, but have great team mates with that expertise.

From what I hear, this is not too rare. There is a large shortage of good programmers in biotech. Probably because the pay is a lot worse than in the tech industry.

I’d recommend new software engineers go work in tech and save money while the economy is hot, and then transition to bio tech when you are looking for some more challenging work and money isn’t as big a concern.

p.s. - our lab is hiring folks without a bio background if they have a strong software engineering/deep learning skill set! Email me yunits@hawaii.edu for more info