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Ah yes, the recurring obsession hacker news has with biology - except that no startup would pay a biologist a software engineer's wage. Talking about biology is

Ah yes, the recurring obsession hacker news has with biology - except that no startup would pay a biologist a software engineer's wage. Talking about biology is nice. But what's nicer is dismantling the elephant in the room.

pm90 6y ago
Aren’t salaries determined by the market? Just to be clear, this isn’t snark. I’m curious how salaried are determined.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  They are determined by the market - mostly - so how much you are paid is going to a function of how replaceable you are, and how much more money the company makes with your position filled or empty, notwithstanding dirty tricks that are somewhat rare.
- postingpals 6y ago
  Salaries are determined by the market, but no one ever mentions how the market determines it... which is usually some combination of scarcity, quality, and, more realistically, how many connections you have, etc. These things give you bargaining power which you can use to negotiate salaries. (This is all very basic stuff but it's more fleshed out than just saying 'the market determines salary'. The market isn't a magical entity, it is run by human behaviour.)
  - klodolph 6y ago
    Yes! The market is the name of the system which sets the salary, but the name has no descriptive power. Just like the opening to the article: > I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names…
    - fennecfoxen 6y ago
      "The market" is the name of a place where, once upon a time, you would go to buy things, and perhaps sell some things you made; stable and consistent prices would emerge without any particular rules about how prices for things should be set, or any particular enforcers of the price, but by the dynamics of the supply of the good and the demand for the good.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dnautics 6y ago
    it's an oversupply relative to demand: - lots of washout MDs - lots of students who wanted to postpone adulthood by getting a PhD (master's are just not respected anymore) - lots of PhDs who couldn't hack the academic game or got disillusioned by it and are used to low salaries because postdocs exploit the high-stakes attempt to get social cachet of professorships. - few jobs. Biology is a capital-intensive endeavour, so each dollar of VC can do marginally less. - it's hard to tell the wheat from the chaff in the labor market (and there's probably a market of lab lemons, too), so a superstar's earning potential is necessarily hamstrung
    - jonas21 6y ago
      > Biology is a capital-intensive endeavour Or, looking at it another way, software is a uniquely capital-light endeavor. Many people who have been in the industry for a few years have enough savings that they could just quit their job and try whatever crazy idea they have without any external funding. You can't do that in biology, or most other fields for that matter. Part of the reason software companies pay such high salaries is to make this option less attractive.
- mauritzio 6y ago
  Salary is higher in areas where the source of money creation is. The current source by our economic design is currently in the banking credit area. Then the business type, telling the story that appears to be the most interesting for these kind of guys, gets most credit, with this credit, all saleries are paid (so independent from real market or need, just based on a 'market' of imagined future value, if we would sell it would be..remember finance crises, people lost real jobs because money creation stopped). So it is no wonder that health care workers get less and others a lot more. Its not really earned but shared along story telling lines. One fairy tail is "market". Unless the banking investment guy gets sick, once in a while, he has no interest for biology or health care, but he likes big machines and cars. Its hard to imagine how biology is usefull for him, unless just to make a lot more money to buy more cars and penthouses, why not 'invest' in that directly?. Just my little theory :-D
- adrianN 6y ago
  "The market" sucks in situations where bargaining power is unequal, the participants don't have all the information and transaction costs are very high.
mjfl 6y ago
it will change, soon.
ludamad 6y ago
Even one's with a biologist as a founder? (Also not snark)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
kevinwuhoo 6y ago
Sure, but luckily there do exist careers somewhere in the middle! Data volumes are becoming much larger and many biotech companies these days are building out extensive software teams to tackle all sorts of challenges. There's also an entire field of computational biology where you apply (and innovate) on huge datasets using ML/algorithms. In both types of roles you can remain fairly close to biology while still writing software day to day. Many biotech companies will even compensate at bay area tech salaries.
mips_avatar 6y ago
I remember how some a16z podcast they were talking about this. How for the salary of a decent frontend web developer you could hire the best biologists in the world. So if you had to hire both, the market is determining a salary structure that would almost certainly cause social issues in your startup.
acomjean 6y ago
bioinformatics (mixing computation and biology) is a profession that is well paid. I'm have a comp-sci background and I work with computers in academia. The pay may not be as high as straight engineering but is good enough to cause some grumblings.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  I remember reading about bioinformatics as a teenager and thinking it was the best option in the world,a career combining a number of my interests! For a little while I was semi interested in looking at that after HS, but I had a bit of trouble finding out exactly what was involved in day to day work and it wasn't exactly something big in hobbyist circles. Of course, things didn't work out that way, I never ended up going to college, or ever really thinking about any science again until the last year or two.
- firstplacelast 6y ago
  No, it does not. It pays better than a lot of scientists in the wet lab, however. I have to do contract work as a data engineer (which pays about 60% more hourly than my bioinfo job) so I can live a decent life. Biotech pays people like dumb-fuck children when you account for the amount of education required. Damn, it is interesting, though, which is what keeps me here. End goal is to have my own company in biotech, which is why I contract to build up a nest egg for eventual entrepreneurial pursuits. Many people with PhD’s in computational bio/bioinformatics in HCOL areas are bringing in <130k/year. It’s really bad.
LetThereBeLight 6y ago
Doing biology, as in culturing cells and performing biochemical assays does not come cheap. Software and wetware development are totally different ball games in terms of upfront costs and risk levels. Just building a wetware proof of concept without university resources is non-trivial in terms of the resources it requires. I don't think biology fits at all in the standard startup model.
- koeng 6y ago
  It only fits the startup model if you know what you’re doing, which is in pretty short supply. You can definitely create a shockingly good lab for ~3000 though.
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > It only fits the startup model if you know what you’re doing, which is in pretty short supply. You can definitely create a shockingly good lab for ~3000 though. Agreed. Biohacking budgets seldom ever go beyond 10k in my experience, I've spent more than that by the time I was 18 on my car and parts. That's not to say that isn't a lot of money, and mostly discretionary, but its entirely do-able. So much stuff can be bought second hand now, or you can do what some Biohackers did and go dumpster diving at University campuses for broken or old lab equipment--Josiah did that to start the ODIN before going to NASA. This requires you either to be in school and know the days they do it, usually after the finals in the Spring on my campus, or pay someone to find out. Either way, its doable: I picked up a microscope and a few cracked magnetic stirring hotplates and a random box of misc glassware and metal stands my Junior year when I swore I was going to turn my living room into a wet-lab once I made enough to buy an old BD flow cytometer after graduation. Those plans were soon dashed when I realized I could just go to the lab of the The Scripps Research Institute after I did my training there my senior year. I think I just ended up giving it all away on Craigslists as a starter 'Lab kit' years later and it was gone pretty fast.
ros86 6y ago
I think this depends a bit on the area. I work in the field of metabolic engineering (i.e. engineering microbes to make new products). When I worked at a biotech company in the Bay Area, I had a pretty decent salary, while still a bit lower than software engineers. Right now, I live in the Netherlands and my guess is that the discrepancy is a big larger here.
- bart__ 6y ago
  Hey I am in my masters of bioinformatics in the Netherlands and was wondering what kinds of salaries you are seeing for metabolic engineering and related fields. In my uni things like salaries rarely get discussed but I think it's quite important.
  - ros86 6y ago
    Are you interested in salary ranges in the US and/or NL?
    - bart__ 6y ago
      Mostly the NL since I don't plan on moving to the US.
benhurmarcel 6y ago
In the end it's not something particular to biology. It's particular to software engineering in the US. Compare to any other technical field and you'll find that the outlier are US software engineers.

pm90 6y ago

Aren’t salaries determined by the market? Just to be clear, this isn’t snark. I’m curious how salaried are determined.

sudosysgen 6y ago
They are determined by the market - mostly - so how much you are paid is going to a function of how replaceable you are, and how much more money the company makes with your position filled or empty, notwithstanding dirty tricks that are somewhat rare.
postingpals 6y ago
Salaries are determined by the market, but no one ever mentions how the market determines it... which is usually some combination of scarcity, quality, and, more realistically, how many connections you have, etc. These things give you bargaining power which you can use to negotiate salaries. (This is all very basic stuff but it's more fleshed out than just saying 'the market determines salary'. The market isn't a magical entity, it is run by human behaviour.)
- klodolph 6y ago
  Yes! The market is the name of the system which sets the salary, but the name has no descriptive power. Just like the opening to the article: > I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names…
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    "The market" is the name of a place where, once upon a time, you would go to buy things, and perhaps sell some things you made; stable and consistent prices would emerge without any particular rules about how prices for things should be set, or any particular enforcers of the price, but by the dynamics of the supply of the good and the demand for the good.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dnautics 6y ago
  it's an oversupply relative to demand: - lots of washout MDs - lots of students who wanted to postpone adulthood by getting a PhD (master's are just not respected anymore) - lots of PhDs who couldn't hack the academic game or got disillusioned by it and are used to low salaries because postdocs exploit the high-stakes attempt to get social cachet of professorships. - few jobs. Biology is a capital-intensive endeavour, so each dollar of VC can do marginally less. - it's hard to tell the wheat from the chaff in the labor market (and there's probably a market of lab lemons, too), so a superstar's earning potential is necessarily hamstrung
  - jonas21 6y ago
    > Biology is a capital-intensive endeavour Or, looking at it another way, software is a uniquely capital-light endeavor. Many people who have been in the industry for a few years have enough savings that they could just quit their job and try whatever crazy idea they have without any external funding. You can't do that in biology, or most other fields for that matter. Part of the reason software companies pay such high salaries is to make this option less attractive.
mauritzio 6y ago
Salary is higher in areas where the source of money creation is. The current source by our economic design is currently in the banking credit area. Then the business type, telling the story that appears to be the most interesting for these kind of guys, gets most credit, with this credit, all saleries are paid (so independent from real market or need, just based on a 'market' of imagined future value, if we would sell it would be..remember finance crises, people lost real jobs because money creation stopped). So it is no wonder that health care workers get less and others a lot more. Its not really earned but shared along story telling lines. One fairy tail is "market". Unless the banking investment guy gets sick, once in a while, he has no interest for biology or health care, but he likes big machines and cars. Its hard to imagine how biology is usefull for him, unless just to make a lot more money to buy more cars and penthouses, why not 'invest' in that directly?. Just my little theory :-D
adrianN 6y ago
"The market" sucks in situations where bargaining power is unequal, the participants don't have all the information and transaction costs are very high.

mjfl 6y ago

it will change, soon.

ludamad 6y ago

Even one's with a biologist as a founder? (Also not snark)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

kevinwuhoo 6y ago

Sure, but luckily there do exist careers somewhere in the middle! Data volumes are becoming much larger and many biotech companies these days are building out extensive software teams to tackle all sorts of challenges. There's also an entire field of computational biology where you apply (and innovate) on huge datasets using ML/algorithms. In both types of roles you can remain fairly close to biology while still writing software day to day. Many biotech companies will even compensate at bay area tech salaries.

mips_avatar 6y ago

I remember how some a16z podcast they were talking about this. How for the salary of a decent frontend web developer you could hire the best biologists in the world. So if you had to hire both, the market is determining a salary structure that would almost certainly cause social issues in your startup.

acomjean 6y ago

bioinformatics (mixing computation and biology) is a profession that is well paid. I'm have a comp-sci background and I work with computers in academia. The pay may not be as high as straight engineering but is good enough to cause some grumblings.

the_only_law 6y ago
I remember reading about bioinformatics as a teenager and thinking it was the best option in the world,a career combining a number of my interests! For a little while I was semi interested in looking at that after HS, but I had a bit of trouble finding out exactly what was involved in day to day work and it wasn't exactly something big in hobbyist circles. Of course, things didn't work out that way, I never ended up going to college, or ever really thinking about any science again until the last year or two.
firstplacelast 6y ago
No, it does not. It pays better than a lot of scientists in the wet lab, however. I have to do contract work as a data engineer (which pays about 60% more hourly than my bioinfo job) so I can live a decent life. Biotech pays people like dumb-fuck children when you account for the amount of education required. Damn, it is interesting, though, which is what keeps me here. End goal is to have my own company in biotech, which is why I contract to build up a nest egg for eventual entrepreneurial pursuits. Many people with PhD’s in computational bio/bioinformatics in HCOL areas are bringing in <130k/year. It’s really bad.

LetThereBeLight 6y ago

Doing biology, as in culturing cells and performing biochemical assays does not come cheap. Software and wetware development are totally different ball games in terms of upfront costs and risk levels. Just building a wetware proof of concept without university resources is non-trivial in terms of the resources it requires. I don't think biology fits at all in the standard startup model.

koeng 6y ago
It only fits the startup model if you know what you’re doing, which is in pretty short supply. You can definitely create a shockingly good lab for ~3000 though.
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > It only fits the startup model if you know what you’re doing, which is in pretty short supply. You can definitely create a shockingly good lab for ~3000 though. Agreed. Biohacking budgets seldom ever go beyond 10k in my experience, I've spent more than that by the time I was 18 on my car and parts. That's not to say that isn't a lot of money, and mostly discretionary, but its entirely do-able. So much stuff can be bought second hand now, or you can do what some Biohackers did and go dumpster diving at University campuses for broken or old lab equipment--Josiah did that to start the ODIN before going to NASA. This requires you either to be in school and know the days they do it, usually after the finals in the Spring on my campus, or pay someone to find out. Either way, its doable: I picked up a microscope and a few cracked magnetic stirring hotplates and a random box of misc glassware and metal stands my Junior year when I swore I was going to turn my living room into a wet-lab once I made enough to buy an old BD flow cytometer after graduation. Those plans were soon dashed when I realized I could just go to the lab of the The Scripps Research Institute after I did my training there my senior year. I think I just ended up giving it all away on Craigslists as a starter 'Lab kit' years later and it was gone pretty fast.

ros86 6y ago

I think this depends a bit on the area. I work in the field of metabolic engineering (i.e. engineering microbes to make new products). When I worked at a biotech company in the Bay Area, I had a pretty decent salary, while still a bit lower than software engineers. Right now, I live in the Netherlands and my guess is that the discrepancy is a big larger here.

bart__ 6y ago
Hey I am in my masters of bioinformatics in the Netherlands and was wondering what kinds of salaries you are seeing for metabolic engineering and related fields. In my uni things like salaries rarely get discussed but I think it's quite important.
- ros86 6y ago
  Are you interested in salary ranges in the US and/or NL?
  - bart__ 6y ago
    Mostly the NL since I don't plan on moving to the US.

benhurmarcel 6y ago

In the end it's not something particular to biology. It's particular to software engineering in the US. Compare to any other technical field and you'll find that the outlier are US software engineers.