6 ms·

I worked in bio tech for 4 years. Amazing people and problems. Worst pay, top heavy salaries. When a phd makes 80k a year and a “ML/AI” data scientist is luck

I worked in bio tech for 4 years. Amazing people and problems. Worst pay, top heavy salaries. When a phd makes 80k a year and a “ML/AI” data scientist is lucky to make 100k you won’t find any progress like software They need to cut the top heavy executive bloat, respect the mid tier with better pay

sho_hn 5y ago
I'm always curious when I hear HN opine on salary levels. Now I understand that in SF / at certain FAANG locations you can expect to make far in excess of 80-100k, and that exerts a competitive pressure in the job market - while also being balanced to some extend by extreme CoL. But I always wonder just how small that bubble is and what the trade-offs really are. In essentially all of Central Europe except perhaps, say, Zurich, 80k-110k is a highly-salaried engineer (and affords an upper-middleclass lifestyle with good healthcare, pension, free college education, etc.), and I understand also in many areas of the US that are just fine to live in. It just sounds like completely different systems / way to run the numbers to me, not at all apples to apples.
- giantg2 5y ago
  $80k-100k would afford a great lifestyle in much of the US, geographically speaking. The problem is that those jobs are concentrated in areas with a higher COL. We also have to pay for things like medical insurance in the US. I know software salaries are lower in the EU (in general), I assume it's the same for biotech too.
- plandis 5y ago
  Even with the higher cost of living in SF/NYC/Seattle, tech pay at FAANG is pretty high. Senior software positions are pretty much start at $300k/yr across all of those companies. Plus these companies generally have excellent healthcare plans and good vacation policies. At those income levels pretty much the only thing you’re really priced out of are nice single family homes, but I suspect that’s the same in Zurich.
  - sho_hn 5y ago
    Sounds like it! :-) I have a Senior Principal position and make products you've probably read about on Ars/Verge type sites recently, at an established tech company in Berlin - for about half of those 300k. And it's not a bad deal for the region.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    When the associate data scientists are making $100-150k, and the product/graphic designers are lucky to be getting $80k, that's pretty fucking top-heavy and absurd.
    - candybar 5y ago
      You're not comparing apples to apples. Senior designers and data scientists also typically make 250K+ (and often 300K+) at these companies.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > At those income levels pretty much the only thing you’re really priced out of are nice single family homes, but I suspect that’s the same in Zurich. You'll never pay it completely but if you can afford a mortgage you'll build equity into it and probably be able to resell it at a profit.
  - cameronh90 5y ago
    What's a good vacation policy in SF? I'm tempted to move from London, but I currently get 28 days holiday a year + 8 public holidays + birthday + Xmas to NY (so about 40 days give or take). I know there's a lot of "unlimited" holiday policies - but would they really be okay if I took that kind of holiday? I earn a lot here in London, but moving to SF would be a significant bump. However, I very much value my time off.
    - topkai22 5y ago
      Not SF, but at my big tech employer it’s 3 weeks of vacation, 2 floating holidays (which are really just vacation), 10 company holidays, and 2 weeks sick leave. After 6 and 12 years you get another week of vacation. So total is 27 to start, not including sick leave. I’ve heard more experienced new hires can sometimes negotiate in more vacation (up to 5 weeks) but I haven’t experienced that directly myself. There are also all sorts of special purpose leaves (jury duty, infant care, bereavement, etc...) that can become quite substantial. All that being said I’ve almost never had a boss who cared about tracking my vacation too closely, and I’ve never felt pressured to not take time off when I want to, other than a half dozen critical weeks a year.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  No, even after any attempt to account for healthcare, pension and education the US will still look vastly better off. Unfortunately we don’t have figures on average individual consumption but by household Hong Kong consumes about $1,000 more a year than the US and the next closest is Switzerland, consuming about $10,000 a year less[1]. Generally the US pays better and at the top of any field you care to mention except perhaps finance it pays far, far better. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...
  - Judgmentality 5y ago
    > except perhaps finance it pays far, far better. I hear this a lot, but I've never seen it. I know plenty of people in tech making the better part of $1 MM a year at FAANG, and a few who even breach that. Most people I know in finance never break $500k. So how much do people make in finance?
    - pvarangot 5y ago
      A friend retired with more than 1M after four years in finance and living the life in NY, like he was not saving much. Most of his comp was commissions on what his algorithms or the stuff his team worked on was marking on the market. His base salary and comp were a little bit above Google, were he worked before switching to finance.
      - harikb 5y ago
        I take it that is not pure finance, but fin tech?
        hogu 5y ago
        Algorithmic trading and quant finance count as pure finance in my book
    - ptudan 5y ago
- ipaddr 5y ago
  The creation of the EU created a situation where supply increased which meant salaries were not going to rise in the richer EU countries. The free college, health care, services is the reason for the taxes. We will see salaries in the UK increase over Germany. Lower salaries make it easier for businesses to compete.
  - ta988 5y ago
    Taxes in California aren't that different from Germany.
- topkai22 5y ago
  The US government data for software engineers says that the median wage across the us is $110k/year. Importantly though that doesn’t include bonuses or stock, which appear to be reasonably common even outside the tech hubs. I suspect the “real” number is closer to $115-120k one those are taken into account. Software engineers really do get paid very well across most of the US, it’s just most pronounced in the tech hubs. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151256.htm#st https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151256.htm#st https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/mobile/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
_Wintermute 5y ago
I worked as a post-doc at a pharma company in Europe, our research-based department was in need of a software engineer as our collection of crappy R/python scripts couldn't actually be linked up to any equipment or processes. HR asked what sort of salary range we were looking at, we suggested that we won't get any decent candidates for less than 70k EUR and were laughed out of the room and they decided on a 50k limit. I've since left, but I'm pretty sure they've still not manage to hire a software engineer.
- planet-and-halo 5y ago
  This bums me out so much. I would love to work on medical research and I love data pipelines, so something like bioinformatics R/Python seems ideal to me, but I make significantly more than that as the manager of a software team in an enterprise environment so it's never going to happen unless I somehow get to the point where I don't have to care about money.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Honestly though, that trade-off seems quite fair to me. I mean, the big ah-hah I had after I spent about half a decade in software management roles is that the management track pays more because the jobs suck more. That is, the jobs themselves are actually quite undesirable for your average person. A job that is more rewarding naturally has more competition and thus pays less.
    - planet-and-halo 5y ago
      I think that's part of it, but I suspect it has more to do commercial enterprises being more competitive due to their greater resources.
- fridif 5y ago
  I don't understand, you guys have PhDs, why can't you write a script yourself? Porting it to java will speed it up a few x, and if it uses some silly library like pandas or numpy or spark then consider it a great time to rewrite it from scratch properly with no dependencies :)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pvarangot 5y ago
I looked into biotech before I jumped into an aerospace startup a few career moves ago. Did some consulting and everything to test the waters, which was compensated "ok" but like half of the hourly rate of doing something even shittier for Google or Facebook. Besides the top heavy compensation problem, the other problem I had with biotech is that everything is swamped in patents, NDAs, secret patents, secret NDAs and in the US there's also a lot of spooky secret government bullshit. I worked on information security so I'm not that scared of three letter agencies, but in my short time dealing with biotech they were actually not letting me do my job, which had never happened before.
amirkdv 5y ago
The grievances shared in this thread re biotech salaries are certainly valid, no doubt. But the field is slowly going through a generational change. There are more and more companies that organize themselves around engineering (software or not) as their main mission. These workplaces then have to grapple with the fact that in order to attract engineering talent, the historical wage suppression of biotech needs to go. Shameless plug: I'm CTO at Streamline Genomics, a Canadian biotech startup, and tech is our limit. We're remote-first and we're hiring for a bunch of positions: https://www.streamlinegenomics.com/careers https://www.streamlinegenomics.com/careers
- dragon96 5y ago
  Can you share more about some of the technical problems Streamline works on?
  - amirkdv 5y ago
    Sure! Our domain is precision oncology. In brief, this is about matching cancer patients with available targeted therapies by examining the genome of their cancer. This is different from how the majority of cancer patients are treated today: surgery and {chemo,radio}therapy. Here is a problem in our domain where tech is one of the limiting factors. If you look at the DNA of any cell and compare it against the reference genome, you'll find a lot of differences, aka variants. Typically even more so if you're looking at a sequenced tumour (~1e6 variants). This is your hay stack. And a variant that can be medically targeted to treat the cancer is the needle. The definition of what variant is "clinically relevant" is layered, context-dependent, and (partially) regulated. Software is responsible for automating away the majority of variants, say down to 10-100, in a justifiable, traceable way. It's also responsible for giving tools to the clinician to deal with the remaining ones. This manual step typically involves an informed line of questioning about each variant backed by 100s of supporting data points about it. Without these two tech pieces, interpreting a single molecular pathology report can and does take many hours of (expensive) expert time, instead of minutes. For a rough sense of scale: human genome has ~3e9 nucleotides (ACTG), has ~3e4 known genes, ~1e6 known gene interactions, and ~1e8 known variants. Typical whole genome sequencing produces > 30GB of raw data (compressed). This is probably the first problem everyone runs into. There are plenty of other ones, some more challenging and interesting than others. Feel free to send me an e-mail if you'd like to discuss this more! amir[at]streamlinegenomics.com
akarma 5y ago
From what I've seen, much of the delta in pay is actually the result of lower profit margins. Facebook, as an extreme example of profitability, can pay its directors and EMs $1m+ per year in total comp, but it's not top-heavy - it pays its engineers ~$200k out of undergrad and >$350k after a few years. By contrast, I know of many cool hyped-up hardware unicorns and biotech companies, and none can compare to FAANG in pay because software scales in a way that other businesses can't. (One hardware unicorn pays its new grad SWEs $60-70k). Unless the biotech company is actually a biotech-focused SaaS company, it's inherently going to have a higher unit cost that prevents software-level comp. It's a disappointing effect of the current system we live in.
gumby 5y ago
The only way to get around these cultural/institutional barriers is to found your own business. I started a pharma company and ran it like a startup (bc it was a startup). Paid decent salaries, worked really hard (literally, one of our contractors complained, “you guys work so hard”). Exited before our phase I/II completed. A parallel way is to start a company that only does one part, say a software based part. Pharma will pay more for tools that solve their problems than they would pay for a couple of FTEs to solve their problem directly. The problem is your customer may not know how to put your product to use, or even understand its value. So sales is no slam dunk. I loved my time in the pharma business but was happy to go back to what’s called “tech.” Culturally the life sciences CES are full of some dreadful pathological practices, and I prefer the pathological practices I’m familiar with :-(.

sho_hn 5y ago

I'm always curious when I hear HN opine on salary levels. Now I understand that in SF / at certain FAANG locations you can expect to make far in excess of 80-100k, and that exerts a competitive pressure in the job market - while also being balanced to some extend by extreme CoL. But I always wonder just how small that bubble is and what the trade-offs really are. In essentially all of Central Europe except perhaps, say, Zurich, 80k-110k is a highly-salaried engineer (and affords an upper-middleclass lifestyle with good healthcare, pension, free college education, etc.), and I understand also in many areas of the US that are just fine to live in. It just sounds like completely different systems / way to run the numbers to me, not at all apples to apples.

giantg2 5y ago
$80k-100k would afford a great lifestyle in much of the US, geographically speaking. The problem is that those jobs are concentrated in areas with a higher COL. We also have to pay for things like medical insurance in the US. I know software salaries are lower in the EU (in general), I assume it's the same for biotech too.
plandis 5y ago
Even with the higher cost of living in SF/NYC/Seattle, tech pay at FAANG is pretty high. Senior software positions are pretty much start at $300k/yr across all of those companies. Plus these companies generally have excellent healthcare plans and good vacation policies. At those income levels pretty much the only thing you’re really priced out of are nice single family homes, but I suspect that’s the same in Zurich.
- sho_hn 5y ago
  Sounds like it! :-) I have a Senior Principal position and make products you've probably read about on Ars/Verge type sites recently, at an established tech company in Berlin - for about half of those 300k. And it's not a bad deal for the region.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  When the associate data scientists are making $100-150k, and the product/graphic designers are lucky to be getting $80k, that's pretty fucking top-heavy and absurd.
  - candybar 5y ago
    You're not comparing apples to apples. Senior designers and data scientists also typically make 250K+ (and often 300K+) at these companies.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > At those income levels pretty much the only thing you’re really priced out of are nice single family homes, but I suspect that’s the same in Zurich. You'll never pay it completely but if you can afford a mortgage you'll build equity into it and probably be able to resell it at a profit.
- cameronh90 5y ago
  What's a good vacation policy in SF? I'm tempted to move from London, but I currently get 28 days holiday a year + 8 public holidays + birthday + Xmas to NY (so about 40 days give or take). I know there's a lot of "unlimited" holiday policies - but would they really be okay if I took that kind of holiday? I earn a lot here in London, but moving to SF would be a significant bump. However, I very much value my time off.
  - topkai22 5y ago
    Not SF, but at my big tech employer it’s 3 weeks of vacation, 2 floating holidays (which are really just vacation), 10 company holidays, and 2 weeks sick leave. After 6 and 12 years you get another week of vacation. So total is 27 to start, not including sick leave. I’ve heard more experienced new hires can sometimes negotiate in more vacation (up to 5 weeks) but I haven’t experienced that directly myself. There are also all sorts of special purpose leaves (jury duty, infant care, bereavement, etc...) that can become quite substantial. All that being said I’ve almost never had a boss who cared about tracking my vacation too closely, and I’ve never felt pressured to not take time off when I want to, other than a half dozen critical weeks a year.
barry-cotter 5y ago
No, even after any attempt to account for healthcare, pension and education the US will still look vastly better off. Unfortunately we don’t have figures on average individual consumption but by household Hong Kong consumes about $1,000 more a year than the US and the next closest is Switzerland, consuming about $10,000 a year less[1]. Generally the US pays better and at the top of any field you care to mention except perhaps finance it pays far, far better. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...
- Judgmentality 5y ago
  > except perhaps finance it pays far, far better. I hear this a lot, but I've never seen it. I know plenty of people in tech making the better part of $1 MM a year at FAANG, and a few who even breach that. Most people I know in finance never break $500k. So how much do people make in finance?
  - pvarangot 5y ago
    A friend retired with more than 1M after four years in finance and living the life in NY, like he was not saving much. Most of his comp was commissions on what his algorithms or the stuff his team worked on was marking on the market. His base salary and comp were a little bit above Google, were he worked before switching to finance.
    - harikb 5y ago
      I take it that is not pure finance, but fin tech?
      - hogu 5y ago
        Algorithmic trading and quant finance count as pure finance in my book
  - ptudan 5y ago
ipaddr 5y ago
The creation of the EU created a situation where supply increased which meant salaries were not going to rise in the richer EU countries. The free college, health care, services is the reason for the taxes. We will see salaries in the UK increase over Germany. Lower salaries make it easier for businesses to compete.
- ta988 5y ago
  Taxes in California aren't that different from Germany.
topkai22 5y ago
The US government data for software engineers says that the median wage across the us is $110k/year. Importantly though that doesn’t include bonuses or stock, which appear to be reasonably common even outside the tech hubs. I suspect the “real” number is closer to $115-120k one those are taken into account. Software engineers really do get paid very well across most of the US, it’s just most pronounced in the tech hubs. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151256.htm#st https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151256.htm#st https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/mobile/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

_Wintermute 5y ago

I worked as a post-doc at a pharma company in Europe, our research-based department was in need of a software engineer as our collection of crappy R/python scripts couldn't actually be linked up to any equipment or processes. HR asked what sort of salary range we were looking at, we suggested that we won't get any decent candidates for less than 70k EUR and were laughed out of the room and they decided on a 50k limit. I've since left, but I'm pretty sure they've still not manage to hire a software engineer.

planet-and-halo 5y ago
This bums me out so much. I would love to work on medical research and I love data pipelines, so something like bioinformatics R/Python seems ideal to me, but I make significantly more than that as the manager of a software team in an enterprise environment so it's never going to happen unless I somehow get to the point where I don't have to care about money.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Honestly though, that trade-off seems quite fair to me. I mean, the big ah-hah I had after I spent about half a decade in software management roles is that the management track pays more because the jobs suck more. That is, the jobs themselves are actually quite undesirable for your average person. A job that is more rewarding naturally has more competition and thus pays less.
  - planet-and-halo 5y ago
    I think that's part of it, but I suspect it has more to do commercial enterprises being more competitive due to their greater resources.
fridif 5y ago
I don't understand, you guys have PhDs, why can't you write a script yourself? Porting it to java will speed it up a few x, and if it uses some silly library like pandas or numpy or spark then consider it a great time to rewrite it from scratch properly with no dependencies :)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pvarangot 5y ago

I looked into biotech before I jumped into an aerospace startup a few career moves ago. Did some consulting and everything to test the waters, which was compensated "ok" but like half of the hourly rate of doing something even shittier for Google or Facebook. Besides the top heavy compensation problem, the other problem I had with biotech is that everything is swamped in patents, NDAs, secret patents, secret NDAs and in the US there's also a lot of spooky secret government bullshit. I worked on information security so I'm not that scared of three letter agencies, but in my short time dealing with biotech they were actually not letting me do my job, which had never happened before.

amirkdv 5y ago

The grievances shared in this thread re biotech salaries are certainly valid, no doubt. But the field is slowly going through a generational change. There are more and more companies that organize themselves around engineering (software or not) as their main mission. These workplaces then have to grapple with the fact that in order to attract engineering talent, the historical wage suppression of biotech needs to go. Shameless plug: I'm CTO at Streamline Genomics, a Canadian biotech startup, and tech is our limit. We're remote-first and we're hiring for a bunch of positions: https://www.streamlinegenomics.com/careers https://www.streamlinegenomics.com/careers

dragon96 5y ago
Can you share more about some of the technical problems Streamline works on?
- amirkdv 5y ago
  Sure! Our domain is precision oncology. In brief, this is about matching cancer patients with available targeted therapies by examining the genome of their cancer. This is different from how the majority of cancer patients are treated today: surgery and {chemo,radio}therapy. Here is a problem in our domain where tech is one of the limiting factors. If you look at the DNA of any cell and compare it against the reference genome, you'll find a lot of differences, aka variants. Typically even more so if you're looking at a sequenced tumour (~1e6 variants). This is your hay stack. And a variant that can be medically targeted to treat the cancer is the needle. The definition of what variant is "clinically relevant" is layered, context-dependent, and (partially) regulated. Software is responsible for automating away the majority of variants, say down to 10-100, in a justifiable, traceable way. It's also responsible for giving tools to the clinician to deal with the remaining ones. This manual step typically involves an informed line of questioning about each variant backed by 100s of supporting data points about it. Without these two tech pieces, interpreting a single molecular pathology report can and does take many hours of (expensive) expert time, instead of minutes. For a rough sense of scale: human genome has ~3e9 nucleotides (ACTG), has ~3e4 known genes, ~1e6 known gene interactions, and ~1e8 known variants. Typical whole genome sequencing produces > 30GB of raw data (compressed). This is probably the first problem everyone runs into. There are plenty of other ones, some more challenging and interesting than others. Feel free to send me an e-mail if you'd like to discuss this more! amir[at]streamlinegenomics.com

akarma 5y ago

From what I've seen, much of the delta in pay is actually the result of lower profit margins. Facebook, as an extreme example of profitability, can pay its directors and EMs $1m+ per year in total comp, but it's not top-heavy - it pays its engineers ~$200k out of undergrad and >$350k after a few years. By contrast, I know of many cool hyped-up hardware unicorns and biotech companies, and none can compare to FAANG in pay because software scales in a way that other businesses can't. (One hardware unicorn pays its new grad SWEs $60-70k). Unless the biotech company is actually a biotech-focused SaaS company, it's inherently going to have a higher unit cost that prevents software-level comp. It's a disappointing effect of the current system we live in.

gumby 5y ago

The only way to get around these cultural/institutional barriers is to found your own business. I started a pharma company and ran it like a startup (bc it was a startup). Paid decent salaries, worked really hard (literally, one of our contractors complained, “you guys work so hard”). Exited before our phase I/II completed. A parallel way is to start a company that only does one part, say a software based part. Pharma will pay more for tools that solve their problems than they would pay for a couple of FTEs to solve their problem directly. The problem is your customer may not know how to put your product to use, or even understand its value. So sales is no slam dunk. I loved my time in the pharma business but was happy to go back to what’s called “tech.” Culturally the life sciences CES are full of some dreadful pathological practices, and I prefer the pathological practices I’m familiar with :-(.