How Much Do Biotech Workers Really Earn? Maybe Not as Much as Politicians Say
Luke Timmerman10/2/09Comments (4)Follow @ldtimmerman
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—Quality assurance—$68,720
—Quality control—$51,292
—Research associate—47,500
This analysis by Ness leaves out what people who are currently holding down jobs are making, and doesn’t include the really big fish like C-level executives who get paid well into the six-figures—the sort of outlier data points that can inflate an average. That’s why Ness used a median, in which half of the salaries were higher and half were lower, because that sort of analysis is less prone to being skewed.
Ness, a bit of a biotech history buff who likes to track the genealogy of the local biotech cluster, told me he didn’t really see any big surprises in the data this year. He’s been using this survey method since 2004, and he was just starting to look for long-term trends when we spoke earlier this week. But at first glance, he isn’t seeing much higher wages now than he did five years ago.
One thing that did jump out at Ness is an increasing number of jobs for things like quality assurance and quality control—the kind of people that biotech companies don’t need in their earliest days, but that are needed as a company matures and gets closer to the marketplace with a new drug. That trend is consistent with the job openings I saw last night on the website of Seattle-based Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN), which has 22 of its 82 current job openings for people with quality control and quality assurance in their title.
That’s not the glamorous sort of stuff of Eureka moments and snazzy industry recruiting videos, but they are vitally important to the success of companies and shouldn’t be overlooked, Ness says. “Community colleges find it especially interesting,” he says.
You can check out some of Ness’s data, which he’s posted here.
Luke Timmerman is the National Biotech Editor of Xconomy, and the Editor of Xconomy Seattle. E-mail him at ltimmerman@xconomy.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ldtimmerman.
scientist
10/5/09 10:06 am
“Pricey graduate school educations”
Grad school for most science students is free, actually you get a stipend, and tuition waived in most cases.
Elizabeth Frick
10/5/09 10:57 am
What a superb example of clear, understandable technical writing about statistical data. I’m studying statistics in preparation for taking an editing exam, and I completely understood all of your text, especially the statistical part. However, if I weren’t studying statistics right now, I still could have understood what you wrote. Great job!
David Lukas
10/8/09 11:41 am
I understand this is kind of just a “hobby” study, not a bona fide academic survey, but there are a lot of problems with the methodology. Yes, median is “less prone” to skew from outliers than average. But outliers are important to the results! The Pareto principle applies here too–those big numbers at the far right of the distribution are still real dollars that go into the economy, so to me, the average is much more meaningful than the median.
The sample is also not random. In a down economy, companies are less likely to be investing in high-salary senior people, which would explain why the job postings are for lower-salary positions. Furthermore, who knows what kind of selection bias is introduced by only looking at numbers from the 10% of respondents who agree to answer your questions (i.e., the more senior the open position, the more valuable the time of the hiring manager, and thus the less willing they are to participate in the survey… etc.).
Ultimately the $81k figure is much more plausible to me.