HACKER Q&A
📣 rafiki6

Leveraging SWE and ML skills for ground breaking work?


Being a SWE or MLE in my case, it seems like we're highly valued as executors on well understood problems.

I'm wondering if there is a way to become a part of something ground breaking like neurobiological research instead?

  👤 dingosity Accepted Answer ✓
It's sometimes hard to find a place to participate if you only have a BS equivalent in computer science. Specifically with respect to neuro-biology, the people participating in research have masters or PhD's in biology. But... that doesn't mean you can't participate, but you would likely have to do a LOT of self-study.

I might recommend doing a survey of relevant academic journals. Bing or DuckDuckGo can help you find them. Many / most of the papers might use jargon you're unfamiliar with, so there's a lot of self-study involved. But the Wikipedia can point you towards citations that may help with that. And papers generally cite other papers. If you live next to a university library, that can help if you can't find a particular paper online.

At some point you're going to have enough "known unknowns" that you can start searching for videos and text books from classes. There are PLENTY of lectures on YouTube.

If you want to participate in research, talking to an existing researcher at the local university or at conferences works well. Though I think demonstrating your interest by having combed over the literature will help your case when talking to existing researchers.

As an undergraduate I was involved in building a scanning tunneling microscope just by hanging around in the optics lab at my local university (I mean... I was already taking classes and had permission to be in the lab. I didn't just crash the lab.) It's sort of amazing what you can get into just by showing up.

Though... fair warning... academia has a well-known habit of paying people subsistence wages (when they're paid at all.) And it's apparently easy to accidentally wander into toxic work-places. If you're used to a SWE salary, it might be hard to go back to living in a tent south of campus and eating ramen for every meal. But there's probably a happy medium somewhere that involves working a day job for cash and reading research papers at night.

My answer is: read papers. If you don't understand the paper, find a paper that explains it. Maybe find an online course that explains it. Network with people online and in person at conferences. Demonstrate that you know the materials in the most-cited papers.