After working as a professional programmer for fourteen years, primarily in ads and web performance, I switched careers to biosecurity. It's now been a bit over a year: how has it gone?
In terms of my day-to-day work it's very different. I'd been at Google for a decade[1] and knew a lot of people across the organization. I was tech lead to six people, managing four of them, and my calendar was usually booked nearly solid. I spent a lot of time thinking about what work was a good fit for what people, including how to break larger efforts down and how this division would interact with our promotion process. I read several hundred emails a day, assisted by foot controls, and reviewed a lot more code than I wrote. I tracked design efforts across ads and with the web platform, paying attention to where they might require work from my team or where we had relevant experience. I knew the web platform and advertising ecosystem very well, and was becoming an expert in international internet privacy legislation. Success meant earning more money to donate.
Now I'm an individual contributor at a small academically affiliated non-profit, on a mostly independent project, writing code and analyzing data. Looking at my calendar for next week I have three days with no meetings, and on the other two I have a total of 3:15. In a typical week I write a few dozen messages and 1-3 documents writing up my recent work. I help other researchers here with software and system administration things, as needed. I'm learning a lot about diseases, sequencing, and bioinformatics. Success means decreasing the chance of a globally catastrophic pandemic.
Despite how different these sound, I've liked them both a lot. I've worked with great people, had a good work-life balance, and made progress on challenging and interesting problems. While I find my current work altruistically fulfilling, I was also the kind of person who felt that way about earning to give.
I do feel a bit weird writing this post: while the year has had its ups and downs and been unpredictable in a lot of ways, this is essentially the blog post I would have predicted I'd be writing. What wouldn't I have written in Summer 2022?
A big one is that the funding environment is very different. This both means that earning to give is more valuable than it had been and it's harder to stay funded. I think my current work is enough more valuable than what I'd been donating that it was still a good choice for me, but that won't be the case for everyone. If you've been earning to give and are trying to decide whether to switch to a direct role, a good approach is to apply and ask the organization whether they'd rather have your time or your donations.
I do also have more knowledge about how my skills have transferred. My skills in general programming, data analysis (though more skills here would have been better), familiarity with unix command line tools, technical writing, experimental design, scoping and planning technical work, project management, and people management have all been helpful. But I'm not sure this list is that useful to others: it's a combination of what I was good at and what has been useful in my new role, and so will be very situation- and person-dependent.
Happy to answer questions!
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Except for ~six months in 2017 when I left to join a startup and then came back after getting laid off.
I did a lot of reading, and a side project around air filtration (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) that I don't think was all that helpful, but mostly I talked to people in the field about what was missing. I think it helped a lot that I was a bit of a known quantity: I'd been writing publicly for a long time which let people have a sense of what to expect from me.
Based on my reading and talking with people in biosecurity I thought the NAO was aiming to solve a really important problem and it had a lot of good people but the group as a whole was too academic: not enough experience building things, learning by doing, or moving quickly. This seemed like a project where my skills were very complementary, and I think that did end up being the case.
Great to hear! I don't have a good sense of what would make sense. The NAO isn't currently hiring, but at some point it's possible we'll be looking for engineers and for candidates who were sufficiently strong elsewhere not having a bio background wouldn't be a blocker.
I do think working on side projects is often pretty good for getting a sense of whether you like the work and other people seeing what you can do. And with LLMs it's easier than ever to get spun up in new domains.
I don't really have good advice on how to get into the field, though; sorry!