I doubt that the discovery rate is a salary issue. Large numbers of extremely intelligent people are employed by the pharmaceutical industry, but due to the immense number of confounding factors and biological realities, it takes a long time to get reliable data from any test when compared to software.
From what I have heard, inside pharma companies it's often extremely dysfunctional and inefficient though.
Every pharmaceutical company including the startups hires software engineers. But the hard parts aren't really a software problem.