Discovering Biology in a Digital World

In our old conference room, in our last office, we used to have this little card on a stand, entitled "Sun's universe of stars." Over the years, we watched several of those stars blink out, one by one. The card disappeared, too. Maybe we got tired of marking off the companies as they went, maybe we just lost the card when we moved to our present office. No matter. Over time, the bioinformatics universe got a little smaller and colder each time another company disappeared from the universe.

But not us.

Our company was started in 1997, and we're still standing. We've kept our heads, done well by our customers, and we're entering our second decade, ten-fold bigger than we were in 1997, and intact and strong. So, in this segment, I will use Geospiza, as an example to show how jobs can be organized in a bioinformatics software company.

Admittedly, my knowledge of software companies is based on a very small sample size. Nevertheless, considering all the hype and the madness in field, we've done pretty well and we're moving forward.

In our company, people work in teams. We have a management team, a development team, a sales & marketing team, and a quality assurance team, and a delivery team. Our development team has programmers, some who began life in biology, some who began in software. We have people who are interested in interface design, people who specialize in databases, IT, software testing, people with strong organizational and planning skills, and people with expertise in science. Our programmers are expected to have deep technical knowledge and strong programming skills. About a third of us have PhD's and unlike many tech companies (at least, this is my impression), close to half of the people in our company are women.

People with degrees in software engineering and computer science work with people, who have backgrounds in biology, to design and build software. Other people have degrees in technical communications and various types of engineering. Many of us have lab experience, having worked in biochemistry, molecular biology, microbiology, and immunology. Many of us have worked with proteins, and enzyme assays, done DNA sequencing, PCR, and other molecular lab techniques. The people with PhD's work in all areas of the company.

As some of the commenters mentioned in a previous post, we all have different talents and skills that we bring to the table. No one expects everyone to know everything; so we hire people who bring complementary areas of expertise.

Click this image to see a larger picture.

Oh, yeah, you're probably wondering what we make. We develop IT solutions to automate genetic analysis. Our products support core laboratories, and organizations that need to automate data workflows for a variety of applications, such as genetic testing, for genome sequencing, for discovering mutations, biomanufacturing, confirmatory analysis - anything that you can do with genetic data - just about. Core labs like us because we provide a complete solution from orders to data delivery.

But, the best part about software is that it's kind of magical. Together we create something cool and useful out of nothing but ideas.

Read the whole series:

• Part I. Careers in biotechnology



A look at the jobs in biotech company, making biomedical products.

• Part II: Bioinformatics

Where does bioinformatics fit into a biotech company? Who makes bioinformatics tools? Who uses them?

• Part III: Life in a bioinformatics software company

How do people work together to make bioinformatics software?

• Part IV: The tip of the informatics iceberg

What about the software engineering and IT side of bioinformatics software companies?