[tdido]

Certainly not because of compensantion, but I switched to academia after 10 years as a consultant by doing a PhD in bioinformatics. I now work in a cancer research centre.

There is a serious lack of people with computational background in the field, very hard to compete with the market in terms of compensation. So we are left with the rare cases where the motivation of the type of work beats that, or the few places (e.g. Broad in the US) that actually have special consideration in terms of salary for computational biologists.

Going through a PhD is probably the one thing that would scare people away as compensation is usually dowright ridiculous, but as someone else mentioned you can find plenty of positions that will but require it. Pretty much all of the students from our Master's degree who don't even have a PhD find jobs in the sector.

[clitty]

Though I'm paid well and I have a relatively comfortable life, my current work is meaningless.

I have a master's in Computer Science from USA, and is currently working as a backend web developer in my home country in Asia.

Some MOOCs I took for fun around biology seemed interesting.

I'm thinking maybe I might enjoy bioinformatics.

How does one get into bioinformatics?

> There is a serious lack of people with computational background in the field, very hard to compete with the market in terms of compensation. So we are left with the rare cases where the motivation of the type of work beats that, or the few places (e.g. Broad in the US) that actually have special consideration in terms of salary for computational biologists.

Does that mean they're paid well? Or they aren't? Sorry English isn't my first language.

[tdido]

Not paid well at all, so compensation can't be a driver. That doesn't mean you can't find decent wages, but the average is low.

If you're still interested feel free to email me and I'll be happy give you some pointers. Email in my profile.