this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
461 points (99.6% liked)
Science Memes
15322 readers
2679 users here now
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Research Committee
Other Mander Communities
Science and Research
Biology and Life Sciences
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- !reptiles and [email protected]
Physical Sciences
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and [email protected]
- [email protected]
- !self [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Memes
Miscellaneous
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Maybe a lukewarm take now, but you can no longer expect to succeed well in biology if you don't have at least an intermediate understanding of programming and statistics.
Without the former, you are going to be wasting a lot of time doing manual work (I kid you not but I see my co-workers waste literal hours gazing at matrices in Excel like they're gonna land on a significant gene by accident).
Without the latter, you are going to be wasting thousands of dollars in reagents and working time running experiments that never had the hope of succeeding (what do you mean I need more than one replicate?).
Yes you can stick to lab work but don't expect to get paid more than the average janitor, because you're competing against literal thousands of graduates who can use a pipette but not R. Maybe if you were a specialist in an expensive niche equipment like flow cytometry or mass spectrometry, but surprise surprise, these kind of equipment require an even more advance understanding of statistics to understand/process the results.
If you're a biologist who thinks you hate math, I promise you programming is more approachable than high school math, there's so many tutorials available these days for free that are leagues better than any material from your professor.
Try to get as many opportunities that involve command line work on clusters, analyses with R, and maybe python as well, and you'd be a candidate that would stick above the rest. Programming and statistics is rapidly becoming a common competency, and if you don't have those skills you won't be able to compete with people who do.
Is programming skills that important in days of LLM where companies are replacing juniors with AI?
absolutely
It would've been smarter of those companies to replace the bosses with AI.