tomharrigan

Yea, I tried to see if Google had a cached version, not seeing anything though.

I don't think I made any claims about relative difficulty, or even in general that Biology is easy. If you look at my post, I have a ton of links to things I think I need to learn. I even included Intro to Biology on my course list. My viewpoint is not that tech people should should move into Bio-related fields because it's easier, but rather because it serves greater benefit to the world than using those skills to build 'cat picture sharing sites'. We have differing skill sets, but if we can become passably versed in each others fields and learn the basics, it would seem to make the challenges that need to be/are being faced a lot easier since we'd now be speaking the same language and can understand what needs to happen to reach those goals and why. I really appreciate your input and if you have any suggestions on starting points, that would be fantastic. My apologies if my post came off in a way that would suggest I was taking the difficulties of Biology for granted.

Right on. I see your point. Part of what I'm doing is taking some of the MIT OpenCourseWare classes, which yes, is mostly reading, but that seems to be a lot of what getting another degree would consist of, though without the research portion. A lot of it is that I'd really like to understand what I'm programming, why I'm programming it and how it's benefitting the community. I think having that knowledge allows you to look at the problems with much better sight and see those things that you might not think of or overlook otherwise.

Steve Yegge gave a great talk about why we should start tackling real world problems instead of building another social network. This is the first step.

Without the question limiting the sample to certain career paths, I think this data set will be largely useless.