Why do software people make more than pharma people?
I have lots of friends at faang companies and also ones in big pharma like Genentech, Merck, Pfizer, etc. usually the life science people are making 130k/year and the software people are often pulling in more than double that. Obvious answer is the market values them as such, but I’m wondering what you think the drivers of that market are. There seem to be lots of tech and bio companies in the Bay Area, so competition seems like it should be good.
Scale and margin bruh. Ten engineers' output can potentially be sold for 50 million USD. At Facebook, few thousand engineers create 40 billion in revenue (16 billion in profits). Show me this kinda margins and value created in pharma and then we'll talk. Also, value is near instantly scalable. If I'm selling to 100,000 SaaS customers, serving 10 million is a lot easier to hit than anything involving process manufacturing, supply chain etc (which you need eventually to hit USD revenues)
In 2017 Facebook had $40b in revenues, Roche had $53b. It seems like they are of a similar scale
Dude wtf, not sure if you're a troll or are serious. Facebook employees 25k? people and got to 40 billion in under 2 decades, Roche has 95k people making that 53 billion after 120 years in existence. And profit margins are 40 percent vs 18 percent.
Tech adds value and most pharmaceutical products don’t.
Disagree, a lot of lives are saved with cancer treatments. We can live without a couple generations of x86.
Amazon. Savage.
Most of the times, a software engineer sells just an idea described in a language which has 0 and 1s. Pharma on the other hand requires chemicals, lots of research etc. which is lot expensive. Also, same software gets replicated and sold. Remember again you are just selling something that you wrote with your mind..I believe that's the reason software engg gets oaid more. Software businesses profit more than equal sized/revenue pharma companies when successful..
Probably the competition? Those same companies pay half what they pay in major American tech hubs at other countries
It's all because of facebook, Google and Microsoft.
Why?
Life sciences career is really tough
Just look at grad school. One PA has post docs and grad students, all competing to get attention.
It's also pharma people make relatively small, given the amount of effort they devote.
Partial explanation: people think it’s immoral when pharmaceutical companies make money from developing lifesaving drugs, so they push for government regulation to limit how much profit these companies can earn. This reduces the expected rate of return on capital invested in the pharmaceutical industry, causing investors to invest in other sectors (e.g. tech) instead.
Also the people I’m talking about are all Stanford, mit types.