Why I Took A Career Hiatus From Software Engineering To Pursue Genetics

I had everything I dreamed of: a job at one of the most prestigious technology companies, a great salary, and a work-life balance where I had time to pursue my hobbies.

I was 4 years into my software engineering role at Meta, working on data infrastructure to manage the company’s massive network around the globe. I’d stayed on the same team the whole time, growing to be a senior engineer and tackling many scalability and reliability challenges that arose. At some point, I stopped being excited about the work I was doing. Work felt like a series of chores: meetings I had to attend, code I had to review, and features I had to develop. After going through this phase for a while (~1 year), I knew I had to make a change.

But why choose biology? To reignite excitement, another route could’ve been to stay in tech and just change teams or companies. But I felt like ever since I started doing computer science at Berkeley, I had followed the traditional career path and never considered other options.

My biology knowledge was terrible; I never took a proper college level biology class (not even AP Biology). The closest thing was a Biology For Voters class in my junior year at Berkeley, which covered biological problems that face the world, such as vaccines and genetic modifications. That class didn’t dive deep into biological mechanisms, but it’s exactly what sparked my interest, seeing how the power of biology can impact the world.

So I started attending night classes while working, learning the foundations of biology. I crafted a multi-year plan, where I would commit to pursuing this space for a couple of years. Once everything was set in place, I was ready to take the jump and informed my team at Meta of my departure.

I ramped up my computational biology skillset over the next year, taking online bioinformatics courses and reading books. I immersed myself with all the innovation and challenges in biotech from protein structure prediction in AlphaFold to gene therapy with CRISPR. One of the holy grails of biology is simulation. If we can simulate an organism or cell, things like drug discovery become orders of magnitude easier and safer. With a computational background, this was the perfect area for me to contribute. And so for my next chapter, I joined a genetics lab in Stanford as a computational biology researcher.

Many people dedicate their whole lives towards that holy grail. If I really wanted to pursue this meaningfully, I knew this career path would likely entail a PhD and dedicating myself to research. But I was not naive enough to commit without actually trying it out first. So I treated this new role as an experiment, with a plan to re-evaluate after 1 year.

Fast forward 1 year into the role, and I’ve decided not to dedicate my life towards that path. Here are a couple reasons why, briefly and in no particular order:

• Reality hit. Meaningful innovation in this space takes a long time and is really hard.
• Day-to-day operations matter. There’s more to work than the end mission. The tasks you engage in and the people you work with can be equally, if not more, important for enjoyment.
• Pay matters. Settling down in the Bay Area is expensive. The opportunity cost for choosing biotech research over traditional software engineering is huge. Industry opportunities for biotech looked bleak as they are highly dependent on the economy due to their research nature.

With that said, I’m very happy I pursued this path. I’ve learned so much about biology and none of it was a waste. It’ll help me make better health decisions and who knows, maybe I’ll eventually return back to this field when things start booming. And as corny as it sounds, I believe the experience will make me a better engineer. I’ve added new dimensions that I wouldn’t normally be exposed to, such as thinking like a research scientist. I’ll bring fresh ideas from a different discipline, and I’ve honed the ability to ramp up quickly and meaningfully contribute in a completely unfamiliar domain.

I’ll save the actual work I did during my time doing genetics for a future blog post. In the meantime, I’ll be preparing a return to the industry as an engineer.