To answer your question about CS (I’m a programmer): Generally, I think your impression that it’s easy to change jobs and subfields is right. My coworker at a web app company used to do some kind of bioinformatics thing, for example. Many CS jobs care less about credentials, so self-study is usually an option.
More generally: Do you have a sense of what you want to do, like what you would actually find more interesting? This is important even just in terms of maximizing impact IMO, and of course it also matters for its own sake.
Also, echoing comments on your other post—this stuff is inherently uncertain, you realistically won’t be able to perfectly plan out your career, and that’s fine.
Hello Ben: Thanks for your answering a lot. I really need for advices about this. If you’d like to, maybe you can share more opinion about my other considerations on the article. I still don’t have strong enough arguments to make a decision now.
1.Thanks for your sharing about changing fields in bioinformatics to web app developing.
I don’t know about CS, but I think there are a lot of subfields in CS: Such as software, hardware, informatics, firmware.. Even software engineers has specailities at different programming languages. Any kinds of careers need speciality. So I really don’t know how it differs as working on a CS field in different companies. Abut how many years does it take for learning/ building new experience in bioinformatics changing to big tech companies? What about changing to machine learning research? Is it feasible to change career at an older age, like 50?(if I have enough money)
2.Are there any more examples that show the impactful cause areas change quickly by time?
Finally, I think it’s hard to say you’re interested in something until you learn some harder courses in college(especially for me, because I’m intersted in a lot of fields). So I still need to make college decisions first.
If you already have a technical background like bioinformatics or maybe even hardware, I think you could learn the sort of web development stuff they do at big tech companies in a few months of self-study or less, at least at a junior level. A lot of programming and CS skills are very general and transferable. ML researcher is more specialized and a master’s / PhD would probably help. But you might be able to skip the postgraduate degree by e.g. getting an ML ops job first, or just with lots of self-study. Note that I only have experience in software / web dev. I’m not sure what the answer to your question about career change at 50 is… I’m sure it’s possible, but I have heard it gets harder to find software jobs because of ageism
Hm, I think the question about cause areas changing is really hard, and I don’t know the answer.
Finally, I think it’s hard to say you’re interested in something
Fair enough! It is good that you are interested in a lot of fields
To answer your question about CS (I’m a programmer): Generally, I think your impression that it’s easy to change jobs and subfields is right. My coworker at a web app company used to do some kind of bioinformatics thing, for example. Many CS jobs care less about credentials, so self-study is usually an option.
More generally: Do you have a sense of what you want to do, like what you would actually find more interesting? This is important even just in terms of maximizing impact IMO, and of course it also matters for its own sake.
Also, echoing comments on your other post—this stuff is inherently uncertain, you realistically won’t be able to perfectly plan out your career, and that’s fine.
加油!
Hello Ben: Thanks for your answering a lot. I really need for advices about this. If you’d like to, maybe you can share more opinion about my other considerations on the article. I still don’t have strong enough arguments to make a decision now.
1.Thanks for your sharing about changing fields in bioinformatics to web app developing.
I don’t know about CS, but I think there are a lot of subfields in CS: Such as software, hardware, informatics, firmware.. Even software engineers has specailities at different programming languages. Any kinds of careers need speciality. So I really don’t know how it differs as working on a CS field in different companies. Abut how many years does it take for learning/ building new experience in bioinformatics changing to big tech companies? What about changing to machine learning research? Is it feasible to change career at an older age, like 50?(if I have enough money)
2.Are there any more examples that show the impactful cause areas change quickly by time?
Finally, I think it’s hard to say you’re interested in something until you learn some harder courses in college(especially for me, because I’m intersted in a lot of fields). So I still need to make college decisions first.
If you already have a technical background like bioinformatics or maybe even hardware, I think you could learn the sort of web development stuff they do at big tech companies in a few months of self-study or less, at least at a junior level. A lot of programming and CS skills are very general and transferable. ML researcher is more specialized and a master’s / PhD would probably help. But you might be able to skip the postgraduate degree by e.g. getting an ML ops job first, or just with lots of self-study. Note that I only have experience in software / web dev. I’m not sure what the answer to your question about career change at 50 is… I’m sure it’s possible, but I have heard it gets harder to find software jobs because of ageism
Hm, I think the question about cause areas changing is really hard, and I don’t know the answer.
Fair enough! It is good that you are interested in a lot of fields