SWE at FAANG is only a minor, frankly irrelevant, portion of STEM. Most people in STEM cannot transition to being a FAANG SWE. In fact, the OP article of this thread is about progression in an academic career, which doesn't pay well unless you become a full professor at a research uni. First time you break low 6 figures in this career is when you become assistant prof in early/mid 30s.

And of the SWEs at FAANG, the ones making $400k in their 20s are yet another tiny slice. So we are comparing a tiny slice of a tiny slice of STEM professionals.

Surgeons, McKinsey management consultants, partners at big law firms, etc., are all tiny slices of much larger, lower-compensated workforces too.

And considering how many tens of thousands of engineers the big tech companies have each, the top slice in our industry isn't that small.

I mean, it is small relative to "all physicians" in the US (why the focus on surgeons?). Or even relative to "all stem PhDs"

> In fact, the OP article of this thread is about progression in an academic career, which doesn't pay well unless you become a full professor at a research uni. First time you break low 6 figures in this career is when you become assistant prof in early/mid 30s.

Is an assistant professor different from a "full professor" in your usage here? I'm not sure how you define "paying well", but low six figures is significantly above average in the US (which is where I assume you're talking about, but also most likely above average pretty much everywhere else too).

Tenure track professors in the US have 3 major levels:

1. Assistant Professor = no tenure, up or out after ~5 years.

2. Associate Professor = tenured, but still not "full"

3. Professor = tenured "full professor"

SWE's are a tiny slice of 'STEM' and by far the most profitable.

How much do you think the average phd in biology makes? maybe 30k/y till 27, then 45k/y till 30, then followed by 75-90?

Doctors are also a tiny slice of medicine. Nurses make a fraction of what doctors make, and other roles like Clinical Laboratory Technologist and Radiology Technician that make healthcare possible make even less.

Law exhibits a bimodal distribution in compensation as well. Paralegals make even less than poorly compensated lawyers.

Also, the super well compensated doctors are a small slice of doctors overall. Most doctors end up doing family practice, which isn't super lucrative. Once you factor in the hundreds of thousands in loans, there are many non-doctor career paths that have better outcomes than that.

And SWEs at a handful of large US tech employers are an even tinier slice.

I think your example of a biologist is a bit disingenuous. By 27 they've probably just wrapped up their PhD and were making a paltry stipend to work in a professor's research lab. If they're inclined to continue working for academia then it's not surprising that they won't break past 6 figures. You could just as easily pick people from different fields that are pursuing a career in academia and find that professors at the top-tier make a fraction of what their students make at top-tier companies.

I also think the remark about "stability" was hand wavy. What is it about non-SWE STEM roles that make them so unstable compared to consulting or law?

> By 27 they've probably just wrapped up their PhD and were making a paltry stipend to work in a professor's research lab

followed by 2-4 years at a postdoc, asked for in every job application for a 'biologist II' which has an average salary of ~77k (per indeed). This is for industry, not academia.

So how am I am misrepresenting the fact that being a biologist takes over 7+ years of being grossly underpaid relative to a SWE at FAANG to wind up being a little less grossly underpaid than a SWE at FAANG?

Forgive me for I live in a bubble so I don't know a great deal about why someone would spend that many years in school to land a 77k job. I also don't know much about compensation structure (ex: is comp == salary or are there other components?)

I do know a couple of friends that work at Genentech who comfortably pull in > 200k so there's that.

> Forgive me for I live in a bubble so I don't know a great about why someone would spend that many years in school to land a 77k job. I also don't know much about compensation structure (ex: is comp == salary or are there other components?)

comp pretty much == salary (plus benefits, like insurance, 4% 401k match, maybe small bonuses). My take is that the low salaries is primarily due to the appeal of the work - kids grow up wanting to be biologists, (chemists, physicists) so there is a labor oversupply. A strong secondary contributor is overhead - a scientist can easily cost 2x salary in overhead for equipment and reagents (very field dependent).

To your point it is possible make decent money in big pharma, but they are essentially the FAANG of the bio/chemistry world and still come with 7y postgrad prereqs.

to your last point, top companies hire before PhDs even defend all the time. In fact it's nice when that happens because then you can go to your committee with the job offer and they will pass you without too much fuss or revisions, sometimes a year early. Post docs are pretty optional in the industry these days, and the prerequisites on job applications for phd science positions are going to be a bit fast and loose.

The trick is to angle your skillset to the industry skill set, network network network, even collaborations with the company directly can happen when you are a grad student. When you show up to the interview and are recommended by the people you networked with and understand their technology since you've been all over it in grad school and have some papers published to prove it, suddenly you are the top candidate in the pile. It's not impossible to do this if you angle your grad career from the start, and go to a school in an area with a lot of these companies and other good research schools nearby.

There's also less room to move. It's much harder for someone whose been doing PCR for the past 6 years to go "You know what, screw this..." than there is for someone whose been working on the analysis of large datasets in say, physics.

And, perceptional-wise, leaving for industry is often seen as a failure.

People doing PCR for 6 years are probably generating a pretty big dataset for analysis...

Bioinformatics is an entire field. The lines between molecular biology, genetics, physics, chemistry, statistics, and computer science are getting very blurry these days. Plenty of bio phds get hired for data scientist roles in industry.

No one is going to knock you for leaving for industry these days. Anyone who is a big deal enough in academia to have that kind of ego is already going to have started a company or three themselves on the side.

PCR doesn't necessarily generate large data sets.

And as someone who works in the field, there's definitely a stigma against students not aiming for PI positions at R1 institutions. There's some practical reasons for that - students who go into industry are less useful for "empire building", but it's also cultural.

I'm lucky enough to be in a field where this isn't as true, but I'm faculty in a multidisciplinary center, and the closer you get to pure biology, the worse it gets.

There might be a stigma in certain places that are becoming isolated from the field, but I would be flabbergasted to hear of any stigma in biology existing on the west or east costs where biotech is, where professors are regularly collaborating directly with biotech companies, where professors are regularly founding their own biotech startups, where graduate programs are offering internship opportunites with private companies, where graduate programs are regularly hosting symposiums with industry representatives, and where departments regularly see the majority of their graduating classes go into industry rather than academia. I think this worldview is two decades out of date.

Idealism, altruism. I was in computational biology, which is slightly less penurious, but FWIW, I wanted to make a contribution to medicine.

Biology is one of the lower paid STEM disciplines, and the toughest to break into professorships. Most biology majors are just premed anyways.

Really? You don't understand why someone would want to become a PhD and make contributions driving a field forward? It's not something I want to do personally, but I find it odd that someone couldn't see _why_ someone would choose to do that. Additionally, positions in academia come with a great deal of prestige.

This is why I have a bit of an aneurysm whenever all of these wildly disparate things are lumped together under the umbrella of "STEM". Notably, we keep medicine in the acronym, but in almost all discussions, doctors and nurses and everything else that would fit under that heading are forked out already. - Edit: derp, it's Math, not medicine, but there's an indication of how brain-rotted I've gotten trying to follow this subject.

Each of them is it's own world with it's own context and it's own problems.

> Notably, we keep medicine in the acronym

I believe the "M" in STEM is Mathematics, not Medicine.

I thought the M was maths and medicine wasn't in STEM?

STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

And this is another semantic issue here.

The article (and my experience) both deal with the "Science" part of STEM, and specifically in biology/biochemistry, and specifically in academia (professorships at universities in hard-science fields).

And defining those boundaries of discussion should be very much a starting point for any of these discussions.

What’s the median salary for STEM engineers versus medical doctors? FANG pays in the p90, but the vast majority of STEM make decent but unsurprising salaries, and that salary requires them to be in a handful of major cities.

As opposed to a physician, median salary almost double of a software engineer, and can live and work in much cheaper cities.