Work is no more meaningful than anywhere else. It’s a big “selling point” for the industry, but it’s just a way to get people to get paid less (yay you’re making the world better than all those garbage people serving coffee or healing sick people or keeping your lights on or optimizing the routes of the goods you have delivered). If you want sustainable systems, trying to be a martyr and work for less only screws this up long term.

Code-base is not open-source. It’s biotech R&D, there is zero culture of sharing outside your organization within industry. You can present high-level things at conferences and such, but you’ll have to rip the raw data out of their dead hands…not happening.

I’ve been in too many conversations about building software to serve larger groups in this industry. It can happen, but it can’t currently and nobody wants it. Confident someone will find a solution, but everyone wants their own home-grown solutions in their own walled-gardens that no one has access to.

Data and the things it can/can’t tell you are held tightly in these companies. I was at a pharma a couple years ago where researchers were explicitly told they COULD NOT test certain compounds in a certain way because they did not want a trace of this data to exist while they were trying to push compounds through the FDA.