I think the main question need to answer for yourself is whether you're more interested in biology or programming, ie do you want to use software tools to do biology (computational biology), or do you want to make the tools that others use (bioinformatics)?<p>If biology, you need to focus on bio, stats, Python, R, and a hundred other specialized tools for working with data.<p>If you're more interested in programming, you can get away with much less bio/stats knowledge, unless you're working on developing low-level algorithms. A lot of the work has more to do with efficiently storing, moving, and visualizing large datasets. Bonus here is that much of this knowledge is transferable to other (much higher paying) domains if you get burned out or want to sell out.<p>My current job could be described as bio-aware web development, with an emphasis in data visualization. I need to know a decent amount of biology, but I can almost always defer stats to others in the lab with more expertise.