dikdik

I drive a beater, it cost me $4k 6 years ago. I spend $40/month on insurance in a big city - liability only, about $150 a year on maintenance (2-3 oil changes, plus misc.), and generally have 1 big repair a year that runs me $300-500. All-in-all that's $75-95 a month plus gas. It's really not a huge toll, even for poor people.

It's weird how companies will hire another company to build a tech product and never ask to see examples of code or put them through white-board interviews. You just show them previous work and talk about what the client needs and how you can meet them.

But even in right-to-work states, to hire a person requires extensive hoop jumping for the employee. You can't just show them previous work and tell them how you can help them, you have to PROVE it with outlandish questions they may have little to do with the actual job.

Relative and absolute deprivation have absolutely little to do with how the poor feel in the US. Further, your argument basically boils down to "people used to be in concentration camps and you're not, you don't get to be upset."

Being content and happy in life has a LOT to do with expectations and we've done a great job of promoting huge expectations for Americans ala "The American Dream!" Poor people don't care that Bill Gates and Elon Musk have near unfathomable wealth. They care that a lifetime of hard work doesn't guarantee a decent home, access to affordable healthcare, or the security to live without constant threat of basic necessities being out of reach.

Further, the poor should demand more! All we hear from the upper class/business owners is more, more, more! Get leaner, cheaper, and make more money! The poor are only following the examples set by the "titans of industry." And if they didn't constantly ask for more, they would be in even worse shape than they are now.

And finally, if you ever want to convince others of your viewpoint, comparing America to third world countries is not the way to go. You've got to put on your oxygen mask before you help those around you. Otherwise you all end up screwed.

So your landlord is losing money by renting it to you? This doesn't make any sense to me...

>He told his entire team, "Tell me how much money you want. I will tell you what you need to accomplish to get it."

This is my dream manager. I've never had a manager ask what they could do for me and actually mean it.

What a waste of time. Raise taxes and pay them more.

Wow, that is extremely depressing for me

Hasn't Uber shown repeatedly that their "standard channels" are broken and don't produce results?

I'm a bioinformatics scientist with an MS.

1) There are a lot of jobs for people with an MS, the hardest part is getting the initial experience though.

2)Pay seems to be all over the place, I make 65k in an expensive city right now. I have had a lot of recruiters contact me with offers that are close to double what I make currently, but they want a couple years of experience first. However, I also see a lot of jobs that require experience that are paying the same or less than what I make now.

3)I don't think there is that much of an oversupply yet, but since a lot of biotechs don't want to pay decent wages and can't get bioinfo. people with what they're offering, they often just grab a bench scientist that has a little bit of coding experience.

4)Yes, there is much less respect from bench scientists and they look at you as a tool to accomplish what they want to accomplish.

Working conditions only seem so bad because of where you are coming from. The conditions are very typical for biotech, if not slightly better (low pay, not a lot of freedom, requires extensive education). I've actually been looking for a good analysis on biotech wages compared to other industries for awhile - so if anyone has one, feel free to pass along.

I came from the bio side, so I got my MS in bioinformatics specifically because it is so interdisciplinary. I doubt I will stay in this industry for the entirety of my working career, likely will move over to health-tech or try my hand at a start-up focusing on services for bioinformatics.

Don't we already have a huge surplus of PhDs?

This is literally a plot line from the show "Weeds".

Also, if I could be guaranteed completely honest and helpful feedback on any rejection.

Not just "not the right experience", but "we need someone who has built a product with xyz framework", or "looking for someone who has had a bigger leadership role before".

>Then there's of course the fact that almost nobody (with citizenship) actually wants to pick crops...

This is complete bullshit and needs to quit being touted. Americans are not afraid of hard, back-breaking labor. I grew up in the Midwest surrounded by corn and soy beans (and not too many illegal or legal immigrants). Tons of my white, middle class friends went out into the field to pollinate corn in the summers or went down to strawberry fields to pick when they came in season.

What a sheltered life you must lead if you've never met an American that does manual labor or works in a field...

The same argument can be made about taxes. Based on your reasoning, it's a race to the bottom for all countries in order to attract businesses.

Are we supposed to have no regulation and no taxation on businesses because otherwise some other state/country can offer them a better deal? Or do we need to have stronger regulation across country borders/policy that prohibits these loopholes. Maybe we should tax a US company more if they choose to produce products in another country to get around regulations that we have in the US.

Make more money...

maybe you should start a scholarship fund for them....you know, be the change you want to see and all that.

Disagree with rolling out a product EU first or disagree that companies need the American healthcare industry to become profitable?

I can't go too much into the product, but there is a solid strategy behind the rollout.

And of course it's easier to be profitable in the US, there is a gravy train of money in healthcare here. While great for healthcare companies, it is AWFUL for consumers.

With respect to the initial comment I replied to, everyone (ie government officials and business owners) claims that changing the US healthcare industry will decimate innovation and every pharma/medical device/etc company will utterly fail!

I've been in this industry less than a decade and have experienced this rhetoric often whenever certain bills come up at the federal and state levels. Everyone freaks out! And then the bill passes....and everything is fine. We just have to innovate a little more, which is a great thing for the consumer!

> We pay 10x what Sweden pays for medical devices, but the US market is the only reason those device companies can be profitable.

Lies, lies, lies, and more lies. This is always quoted, especially in the context of pharma. It's wrong. Americans pay for advertising (which is illegal in most first world countries) and for the yachts and islands of the big healthcare execs.

I work at the intersection of biotech and healthcare. Currently working on a healthcare product that will be rolled out in the EU before the US and will be profitable from day 1 without being "subsidized" by Americans.

So then maybe it would be cheaper for the company to hire a low-skilled American worker and actually gasps train them?

The CEO of the theoretical company is always welcome to put in an extra 30 hours a week and reap the extra economic value.

So we should invest more in education so we can have even more highly educated people?

We should also make it easier for people to take risks (one of the most common attributes of successful entrepreneurs is that they came from upper-middle/upper class backgrounds) by providing a better safety net for those that want to venture out on their own. Socialized healthcare, investing more in education so citizens aren't mired in debt, etc are ways to do that.

I would venture that at least half of successful entrepreneurs are not special or exceptionally brilliant, but they are intelligent- enough, well-off enough to take "risks" over and over, and connected-enough to get others to help with those plans.

We have a massive pool of Americans that could do a hell of a lot more for the country if everyone were given the same opportunity that the top 10% get.

If this was true, salary increases would follow suit. Biotech is not a well-paid industry, especially considering the level of education required. Ergo, we have way more people than we need in this industry already (yes, business owners probably disagree).

If he did it in a pleasant manner, like every other pharma exec, there would not be this level of outrage about what he did.

Are you ok with being price-gouged on your healthcare as long as the pharma companies say "please" and "thank you"?

>they would need to either spend less on education (and consequently become less prestigious)

Given many studies (notably Google's) showing that school performance is not a good indicator of future performance. Is losing prestige such a bad thing? It would be if the prestige was correlated with significantly smarter and better performing graduates.

But if the prestige only comes from being associated with higher class individuals, all you are losing is a false-positive signal.

Interesting. Often I hear that you are only worth what value you can provide in any one role. Like for me working in bioinformatics, I am paid much less than if I took my skills to pure tech. There is only so much value my skills can provide in this industry, but if I went to tech my skills could provide 3-4x the value.

Despite being able to show I could get paid much more at a tech-company, my company will not pay me more. However, you are claiming that the opposite is also true. You are not paid based on the value you can provide to an organization, but based on how much you COULD provide to other organizations.

So I think you are wrong. These are all just attempts to justify why companies are averse to highly paid employees, but will happily spend 10x a key employee's salary on a new machine or on a month worth of consultants.

I agree here. Over the holidays I was speaking with a sister of mine, she recently finished her undergrad degree and moved from working in a salon (all women) to working in an office environment with a very strong sales culture (~90% men).

She made the observation that she enjoyed working in a male-dominated work place more so than the female-dominated work place and gave several reasons relating to social dynamics.

The big way they are figuring out how to repurpose old compounds that fell out of the pipeline is by using biomarkers.

We are now much more equipt at finding biomarkers, generally through gene sequencing. Drugs that failed, often failed because they were applied to an entire population of a disease (ie multiple sclerosis). Now, we can subset the MS population by different biomarkers and test just that small subset for efficacy.

While testing anyone that happens to have MS would show a massive failure rate, testing 5% of the population that has specific biomarkers, we may be able to show a huge increase in efficacy and thus the drug would be approved for MS patients that fit the exact bio marker profile.

Right? A family member was out with me at a wine tasting a year ago, stepped outside for 30 minutes to take a phone interview, and came back. She received an offer two days later.

I think it all boils down to being in a profession that's in very high demand.

Meanwhile, family and friends that are traveling nurses (ie a job that ACTUALLY effects life and death) have 1 phone interview with a hiring manager that can last 20 minutes to an hour. That's it.

Then they receive a decision within a week (though often within a day or two).

I'm not too sure about that. I spent several years working closely with a massive group of physicians (40+ in the same specialty), where I routinely had to check medical reports before they went to clients.

While all very bright people, many of the physicians that attended middle-of-the-road medical schools and even one that went to a Caribbean medical school were much better than the couple Harvard trained docs we had.

Some people actually have trouble getting a risky surgery performed because surgeons don't want to screw up their stats. It's a very tricky problem to solve.