why a developer

So, my aim for this post was to see how well I could romanticize the role of a developer and the tech industry as a whole. These are my assumptions coming into and exploring the field, it will be interesting to see how my perspective changes over time.

In the world of biotech, my experience has been that being able to start a project is essentially impossible without decades of experience, a lot of capital, infrastructure, and permission behind you (let's call these ECIP).

The tech landscape, in contrast, seems to be the complete opposite of this, from a developer's perspective at least. Developing software requires a lot less capital and infrastructure in comparison to a biotech endeavor. Additionally, in terms of permission, there is no need to have your bootstrapped project siphoned by regulatory bodies or certification boards for accreditation, the only limiting factors here seem to be: a. your ability to code, and b. your ability to generate good ideas.

Whilst I have no good ideas, having the option to pursue an idea at my own whim is something that I like the sound of.

Keeping with the theme of iteration, I mentioned in the previous post that the most successful people are those who learn quickly from failure. I believe that this framework of thinking goes hand in hand with being a developer. As something that requires minimal ECIP, failure is likely to happen much quicker and thus increase the possible number of iterations, which subsequently accelerates the learning curve. The number of iterations possible as a developer within a year is much more than that of a process developer in biomanufacturing.

Another reason why being a developer is attractive to me is that the upper limits of the role seem to be only dependent on my ability as a developer. For a second, let's forget all the other factors that are important in an app development process and focus on just the roles that the developers play. It is easy to imagine that the best developer would be several orders of magnitude better and quicker in developing an app than their novice counterpart. Whereas, if we were to compare the best lab techs to a junior lab tech, I would say that best case scenario, there is a 5X difference in how much better and quicker they can perform their experiments. This is because there are only a few ways you can streamline your tasks before the time-dependent chemical reactions become a limiting factor. Needless to say, a career in the former would be much more fruitful.

The reasons that I have laid out are the ones that I think are not the most intuitive, other reasons include:

• Continuous Development- constantly at the forefront of knowledge
• High Demand- demand is only going to increase
• Remote working- ideal for personal life
• £££- £££
• Broad field- a lot of room for vertical and horizontal career development
• Collaboration- open-source development with collaboration from people from all over the world.