>>12260068I'm a cell biologist who actually transitioned to comp sci/machine learning in the drug development space and it depends on what you mean by "playing around"
It sounds fun on the surface and can be pretty exciting to see results, but 95% of your time is spent banging your head against the wall and troubleshooting experiments. It's a total pain in the arse when the assay that worked the first two times doesn't work this third time and you've done it 10 times now with various tweaks and still nada.
I work with primary cell cultures we get from mice and it's also a pain in the ass scheduling everything around them. Sometimes with our luck, the mice I need for an experiment aren't there and I'm twiddling my thumbs for a month while we wait. And then they all come at once- always on the weekends, before some deadline, or during a holiday- and I spend a frustrating amount of time doing work and coming in at random hours for time course shit, etc, and it will sometimes still just fail.
But its nice to know different techniques and there is something very satisfying about working with your hands/moving around physically that I miss. There's a key element of the physical that really is part of the "intellectual satisfaction" or whatever voodoo lets me feel good about what I do.
On the other hand, I fucking love coding because its a direct 1:1 work-to-product ratio. If I put in X hours, I get Y results. There's no chance of me putting in X hours and the experiment failing/looking horrible/whatever. That sort of stability is so, so nice to have. I do dislike sitting all day, but I enjoy the comfort of things working more.
