Sometimes I get a bit disillusioned with the types of projects that I work on as

Question

Sometimes I get a bit disillusioned with the types of projects that I work on as they are just basically business apps that aren't exactly groundbreaking and are usually redundant as far as other applications already existing that do similar things. I have thought that it would be nice to possibly eventually get into working as a programmer for a company that is doing medical research or some other type of scientific research to where I would feel I am working towards something that I feel is potentially beneficial to a wide number of people, this relates to some recent life experiences but I won't get into that here. Also, I'm not really interested much in doing computer science research, more research for other fields that make use of programming.

I currently work as a Java web application programmer and I don't know much about jobs of the type that I would be looking for in this field. I would be interested to hear from anyone with experience in this who could possibly point me towards resources or tell me a bit about what working in this field would be like, I assume it would be quite different than working for the types of businesses I have worked for so far. Thanks for any info

Explanation / Answer

I work in a research lab, the main work is designing hardware/software for use in neurophysiological experiments. It's madly interesting, especially compared to what some other people I graduated with are doing, and as you say it really gives you the feeling you're doing something that matters. Especially because some features you develop get used the day after they're finished and produce results that are used to write papers etc. Some of the things we do in the lab are also pretty groundbreaking and kinda futuristic (in the veins of putting electrodes into the human brain and hooking it up to a machine: watching the analog signal from a single neuron's electrical signal live is really a strange experience)

To be honest I don't think there's much use though for someone with your background in a lab like ours. Java just won't cut if for hard realtime systems and signal/image processing. But again, that's just in our lab. There are tons of other fields being researched where a decent java programmer would be a way beter investment than having the students/post-docs do the programming (most of this people have a pure science background, if you'd see the programs they produce you'd cry, most of them have no clue about programming principles at all). Eg the lab next to ours does lots of patient sudies involving basic stimulus presentation programs that are written by a java programmer they hired for a couple of years. So you'll just have to keep an eye for open positions in your area, visit sites from hospitals/universities to see if they are hiring. And maybe you'd alos benefit from learning a lower level language than Java, it should give you more opportunities.

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