I agree. A lot lab do not want to hire good developer or data scientist. Or they do not have the money to hire, even they spend thousands in data collecting.
I believe money is definitely a big part of it. If you have the skills needed to help manage and analyze "big" data (big as in too big to realistically handle in Excel, which is the limit of most biologists), you can easily earn much more somewhere else.
Partially. I worked with bioinformatics labs until recently. Career progression is limited as they treat a software engineer as a technician, and nothing more. They don't appreciate the value you bring unless you are publishing papers (certainly in the last two institutes I worked in).
check the job here, most of them are postdoc level. https://www.biostars.org/t/Jobs/
the postdoc level means you get about 50k~80k, even in bay area.
The situation is really bad.