Tooling roles in SWE in every other field are highly regarded. Why not here?
They have a hard time having someone with a BS or MS making 50-75k more than a freshly-minted PhD.
I just left a job in pharma because I cannot do it anymore (salary being a big one, but my experiences reflect many in this thread).
They spent 500k on a consulting company to build a few NGS processing pipelines. This was built using a framework I was unfamiliar with. I re-factored one of them and was able to increase runtime by 60% in a couple weeks. I was paid in the low 100’s.
They would rather contract out the high-paid work and pay orders of magnitude more for it.
it depends on the role. it worked out really well for me when I got to drop in and do piece work on lots of projects in different fields. working on a larger software development project can be really painful and demoralizing because the people running it don't really understand how the sausage gets made.