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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, mor

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.
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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.

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

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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.