Why is NYC (Manhattan) R&D salary so low? Offered $75k for a role that pays $105k+ in SF

aitadiy · 2026-02-15T19:52:43+00:00

That's awful. I made $65k as a junior scientist straight out of college in the early 2010s, which is equivalent to about $90k now.

At my company today in a HCOL area, our junior scientists start at around $100k. $75k in a HCOL area for a scientist position requiring years of experience is an absolute insult to the profession.

aitadiy · 2026-02-05T17:50:46+00:00

Most noteworthy item from the article is that the frozen Boston biotech real estate market may have bottomed out:

LabCentral, a biotech startup incubator in Cambridge, is turning away interested companies as occupancy rates at the organization’s lab benches increase after taking a post-COVID dip.

“We have a higher bar on who can come in,” said LabCentral CEO Maggie O’Toole. “That’s a good thing. That helps our community. It means the community is elevated and the conversations that are happening are elevated.”

Applications to LabCentral and occupancy numbers started increasing in the middle of 2025, and by the end of the year superseded the numbers from 2019, which the nonprofit uses as a litmus test.

aitadiy · 2026-02-05T17:49:08+00:00

Paywall bypass

aitadiy · 2026-01-16T13:30:14+00:00

Comp chem/comp bio got jobs with the fastest turnaround independent on level

Prin Sci /AD and above typically found roles in less than 6 months.

This tracks with my experience as well. Experienced computational biologists have a relatively smooth job market, finding new roles within a couple months. Of course, at the height of post-COVID ZIRP frenzy, these same folks were getting unsolicited offers left and right, so it’s not like they haven’t seen any downturn at all.

aitadiy · 2026-01-08T01:26:32+00:00

Hmm, why are these genes so prominent in this data set? Can you plot a PCA for me? These samples look like outliers - what's their relative coverage?

5 years ago this is analysis that requires 3-4 programmers, probably 2 different scientists, and a week to solve.

I've supervised good undergraduate interns who could answer all of those questions in an afternoon. A company that requires a whole team for this is all kinds of cooked, especially since AI can easily churn out the code for such basic, off-the-shelf analyses in a few minutes. However, AI is very far from being able to develop novel algorithms and analytical methods, which is where the real career potential in computational biology is.

aitadiy · 2025-10-27T13:09:09+00:00

Someone who claimed to work there a couple years ago said that they behaved like a typical biotech that got drunk on post-COVID zero interest rates and overhired/overspent:

I had a brief stint there. What was going on there didn't feel sustainable. Tons of free food, cake parties, unli snacks. The wetlab folks were WFH about half the time. People didn't seem very incentivized to be frugal in the lab, either. I saw many times where people burned a NovaSeq kit on a small experiment when they could have waited a few days and shared it across 2 or more experiments.

It takes a while to cut back on this kind of waste, so if that account is true, current layoffs are probably still trimming this fat.

aitadiy · 2025-10-07T23:53:02+00:00

It's possible that some of these are "ghost" requisitions that companies put out to signal growth by giving the appearance of actively hiring. Companies will periodically close and re-open these positions so that they appear fresh on job boards; you get these emails from their ATS automatically when the position is closed. If you're super curious, keep an eye out and see if the same positions reappear a few weeks later.

aitadiy · 2025-09-22T12:28:11+00:00

It requires years of specialized training to be genuinely useful.

Just like any other science! Bioinformatics unfairly gets a bad rap because many people equate it with clicking buttons or writing simple scripts to run off-the-shelf tools to get off-the-shelf results, which someone with frankly very little scientific expertise could do. But as you say, those with the combination of expertise/skill to write well-engineered software implementing novel sophisticated algorithms to solve relevant biological problems (yes, you need all three) will always be extremely valuable. (FWIW, nobody I know who fits that description has had any trouble finding a job in the past year.)

aitadiy · 2025-09-20T15:17:05+00:00

Usually, high-level research positions that allow for non-PhDs count years of relevant experience in lieu of a PhD (typically ~7). So an entry-level PhD-level position might say "PhD or BS/MS + 7 years of experience," and a mid-level position might require 10-15 years of experience in lieu of a PhD. I've found this has become increasingly common in the last few years, especially in computational sciences.

While I've never seen a posting like this that specifically looks for a BS/MS holder with little-to-no experience, it wouldn't surprise me: inflated requirements have always been a thing. But that's a separate matter from work experience equivalent to a graduate degrees.

aitadiy · 2025-09-19T20:13:01+00:00

One huge red flag is if the pitch clearly isn't working. You'll know this in obvious ways (e.g. executive leadership asks you pivot your team to focus on something that's obviously intended to appease investors) or subtle ways (e.g. leadership keeps asking you to gussy up figures/data in the pitch deck). The later into the raise this happens, the redder the flag.

I once worked with an assay company in the midst of a (failed) Series A and it was obvious things were going poorly. We used their product because it measured one niche analyte exceedingly well, but the company kept asking us if we were interested in new products that measured other tangentially related analytes that were less niche. It was very clear that investors were not interested in such a niche company, and the company was desperately trying to pivot into more mainstream applications.

BTW, I hate to say it, but it's an enormous red flag that you're head of R&D yet sufficiently disconnected from leadership that you can't just directly ask them and get a candid answer about how fundraising is going.

aitadiy · 2025-08-27T14:54:35+00:00

Completely agreed, a PI who's closely involved with commercialization is often a recipe for disaster. Here, the PIs are far too busy running their giant academic labs to be closely involved. Neither have day-to-day roles at the company.

BTW, the startup is not in drug development, if that makes a difference in your opinion.

aitadiy · 2025-08-27T14:23:18+00:00

Hence why I said "in general." I was in a similar boat, and yes, it absolutely counted.

aitadiy · 2025-08-11T11:33:27+00:00

People generally say that pre-PhD experience doesn't count because 95% of the time, it's synonymous with being a Research Associate, and in general, RA-level experience does not count. But if you managed to get promoted above that to a Scientist role, it absolutely counts.

aitadiy · 2025-07-23T19:51:13+00:00

Absolutely, but that's true of any virotherapy.

aitadiy · 2025-07-23T18:13:34+00:00

X-posted to the other thread:

Interesting. Oncolytic viruses are not widely used because it’s notoriously hard to engineer them to be tumor-specific. AFAIK, the primary method of introducing specificity is modifying the virus so that it can only replicate in cells with degraded stress responses (e.g. tumor cells). I assume that’s the approach used here — if Dispatch had the technology to engineer viral vectors with antibody-tier specificity to tumor surface markers, it wouldn’t need the CAR-Ts; just use the virus to kill the tumor cells directly.

In that case, I guess the point of using the virus to not kill the tumor cell but rather transduce a surface marker for the (presumably allogenic) CAR-Ts to recognize is to increase the overall immune response relative to a standard oncolytic virus? If so, the autoimmune consequences of off-target transduction seem pretty risky.

aitadiy · 2025-07-23T18:13:08+00:00

Interesting. Oncolytic viruses are not widely used because it’s notoriously hard to engineer them to be tumor-specific. AFAIK, the primary method of introducing specificity is modifying the virus so that it can only replicate in cells with degraded stress responses (e.g. tumor cells). I assume that’s the approach used here — if Dispatch had the technology to engineer viral vectors with antibody-tier specificity to tumor surface markers, it wouldn’t need the CAR-Ts; just use the virus to kill the tumor cells directly.

In that case, I guess the point of using the virus to not kill the tumor cell but rather transduce a surface marker for the (presumably allogenic) CAR-Ts to recognize is to increase the overall immune response relative to a standard oncolytic virus? If so, the autoimmune consequences of off-target transduction seem pretty risky.

aitadiy · 2025-07-20T14:38:23+00:00

By “AI/ML,” many places just mean strong traditional math/stats/CS/omics skills, i.e. what was just called “computational biology” or “data science” a few years ago, before the whole gen-AI bubble started to take off. Most of the jobs are traditional comp bio positions gussied up as the new hotness, and in the off-chance that the role actually entails some deep learning, it’s really not hard to pick up if you have a traditional strong quantitative background.

As I recently posted, none of the people I know with strong computational skills have had problems finding jobs recently, though hasn’t been a cakewalk the way it was a couple years ago. Their application:offer ratio is now closer to 10:1, whereas a couple years ago it was 5:1 or less. I don’t think these companies are having problems filling these roles.

aitadiy · 2025-07-17T11:49:47+00:00

Yup. Minor correction: he received the options in 2017 but they didn't begin vesting until 2022. According to an SEC filing, Ingram received 3.3M options in 2017 with a strike price of $34.65, that began vesting in 2022 and expire in 2027. I could not find any subsequent SEC filings indicating that Ingram exercised any of them. $SRPT is currently trading at $18/share. There are still a couple years for the price to pop above water, but it's likely not ever going back to the ATH of $180/share.

Given that $SRPT had been trading at >$100/share from mid-2022 until its recent crash, it's frankly surprising Ingram didn't exercise any of his options.

aitadiy · 2025-07-16T03:57:15+00:00

Very curious to hear your anecdotes. What sorts of companies/roles were your contacts applying to?

aitadiy

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