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.
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.
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.
(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.)
> I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names…
- 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
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.
The pay may not be as high as straight engineering but is good enough to cause some grumblings.
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.
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.