[akarma]

From what I've seen, much of the delta in pay is actually the result of lower profit margins.

Facebook, as an extreme example of profitability, can pay its directors and EMs $1m+ per year in total comp, but it's not top-heavy - it pays its engineers ~$200k out of undergrad and >$350k after a few years.

By contrast, I know of many cool hyped-up hardware unicorns and biotech companies, and none can compare to FAANG in pay because software scales in a way that other businesses can't. (One hardware unicorn pays its new grad SWEs $60-70k).

Unless the biotech company is actually a biotech-focused SaaS company, it's inherently going to have a higher unit cost that prevents software-level comp. It's a disappointing effect of the current system we live in.