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Same skill, five times the pay
The biotech premium
Medical school was not part of it. The biotech writer only needed experience writing about biotech, and the company hiring paid about a quarter of a million for the role, five times what writers at its other companies earned.
Where a skill is sold can swing its value wildly. Having the skill and landing work in the right industry are separate things, since someone can do everything right and still never get a biotech writing job, but standing in that position raises the odds.
Switching industries
The same shift showed up in marketing. The first stretch of one marketing career went to helping Uber, a fizzy drinks company, and a dress seller sell their products. The next stop, marketing biotech companies about to go public, brought a first contract worth 8 million for six months of work, a pivotal moment in that career.
Why do biotech companies pay writers so much?
Biotech companies earn their money from a small number of products, and each product depends on mountains of precise documents: clinical trial reports, regulatory submissions, and investor materials ahead of a public offering. A mistake in those documents can delay an approval, and delays are expensive. A widely cited estimate from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development put the average cost of bringing a new drug to market at about $2.6 billion.
Why does the same skill pay differently by industry?
Economists Alan Krueger and Lawrence Summers documented the pattern in a 1988 paper in Econometrica. They found that workers with similar education and experience earned different wages depending on their industry, and that the rankings of industries stayed similar over time and across countries. One explanation is that highly profitable industries share more of their profits with employees. Another is that firms with costly mistakes pay more to attract and keep careful workers.
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