I’m a software engineer/programmer by profession and schooling, but I have a life-long fascination with little critters, especially insects, and especially Apocrita and Lepidoptera among insects. I’m an avid participant on iNaturalist and have almost as much reputation on Biology StackExchange as on StackOverflow. I also enjoyed proofreading oncology papers for my brother in law when he was doing his PhD because that stuff is fascinating when you have somebody who can explain it to you.
I’m not spending more effort in biology or entomology mainly for three reasons:
1. lack of time, especially since getting married and having kids;
2. lack of mental energy partly due to kids, partly because I’m tired enough fighting inane requirements or some stupid half-assed TypeScript “framework” du jour every day at work;
3. I’m not confident I can make as much money in entomology as in I.T.
Lack of interest has never been one of the reasons for me.
Well sure, there’s always a few whose random area of interest might land on microbiology. Most career developers I know are autodidactic obsessives who have no trouble finding fascinating rabbit holes to crawl down. Then life advances, gates close, time gets constrained and you have to pick your passions in life because you can’t do them all.
I tried to use the word “likely” to avoid these points being perceived as absolute laws. I think it’s simply less likely that any random programmer will have motivation to learn microbiology than it is for a microbiologist to learn some programming techniques.
The microbiologist may be compelled by functional requirements for their job to learn some coding while the programmer, unless working on business problems in that domain, would never be professionally compelled to learn microbiology to reinforce their profession aims.
I’m a software engineer/programmer by profession and schooling, but I have a life-long fascination with little critters, especially insects, and especially Apocrita and Lepidoptera among insects. I’m an avid participant on iNaturalist and have almost as much reputation on Biology StackExchange as on StackOverflow. I also enjoyed proofreading oncology papers for my brother in law when he was doing his PhD because that stuff is fascinating when you have somebody who can explain it to you.
I’m not spending more effort in biology or entomology mainly for three reasons:
1. lack of time, especially since getting married and having kids;
2. lack of mental energy partly due to kids, partly because I’m tired enough fighting inane requirements or some stupid half-assed TypeScript “framework” du jour every day at work;
3. I’m not confident I can make as much money in entomology as in I.T.
Lack of interest has never been one of the reasons for me.