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Comment by arcticfox | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the recent Phase 2 failure of UBX's UBX0101 senolytic drug. The highly experienced team's entire strategy was built around eliminating as much risk as possible prior to Phase 2 and yet they still failed miserably. Biotech just seems brutal, from the outside at least.

For a very interesting but pre-failure interview of UBX: https://peterattiamd.com/neddavid/

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I think we still lack fundamental tools that can allow anyone to say with reasonable certainty that drug X will work. All you can do is eliminate as much as risk as possible, but if you don't know baseline risk and how much each precautionary step actually reduces the risk by, you're still shooting in the dark. The only people that can 'win' in biotech are investors or pharmaceutical companies, namely those who can take a portfolio approach.

Has anything changed recently, or is biotech still far less well compensated than software, relative to years of experience and education?

At least in the bay area the gap is enormous - and biotech is not known for paying poorly!

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying biotech is better paid in the bay area?

No he is saying the other one is overpaid

tier-1 biotech in the bay area (genentech, gilead, etc) pays less than tier-1 tech (google, facebook, etc), but that's mainly because FAAMG pay such absurdly high base salaries.

The difference is less profound for tech folks at biotech companies than it is for biotech people. Certainly when I worked at a biotech startup for a year, after leaving FAAMG, I was able to negotiate the same base salary, but base salary is only a part of total comp...

Hey! I’m the author. Biotech is not as well comp’ed, especially when you compare years of experience. For context, senior (Director, VP) levels make low to mid 200s, PhDs with work experience make mid 100s, and straight out of grad school make 80-120s

This doesn’t take into account equity, which most bio hires have zero context for and are easily taken advantage of when negotiating. I give equity packages in line with tech standards, but I could have cut them by 3-5X and still been competitive with the standard bio co.

unrelated, but I browsed your company website and think the idea is brilliant (especially after reading this: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acel.12737, which confirmed my initial speculation).

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