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Well this has been a fun week. The three of us QA Analysts have been promoted (without raises) to "Lead QA Analysts", and the QA manager is leaving within the week. We're going to be overseen by the cheapskate CEO instead. Yes, that means we lead audits and run the quality management system without any additional training or recognition of authority. I can't loving wait for our next audit. Also, the CEO is no longer paying for coffee. What the gently caress.
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Jun 15, 2011 18:12
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Oof... good luck with that.  Found a new job yet?
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Jun 15, 2011 20:43
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Sundae posted:Oof... good luck with that. Not yet, but I'm working at it. Had a few interviews though, so that's a start. What's going to be crazy is that the CEO just doesn't care about quality control and I can't wait for him to start demanding that we do all sorts of sketchy poo poo. He basically has the attitude that he's the boss and he was a professor for 20 years and he's smart and you're a loving idiot. It's going to be amazing watching this place fall apart in real time.
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Jun 15, 2011 21:48
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From what I've read in your posts, you're already seeing it fall apart in real time. Food inspection / QC firm actively not caring about quality audits is a pretty good sign that poo poo's broken.
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Jun 15, 2011 22:16
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I need a way to blog/write/give talks about my experience here. I feel like there's a ton of "don't gently caress up like they did" business/quality stories I could tell.
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Jun 15, 2011 23:03
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I'd read it if you wrote it; of course, don't go risking jobs or confidentiality agreements to entertain a bunch of goons.  Another week, another two lab scientists down! My favorite co-worker has quit, and her office-mate is going on six-month personal leave for an unstated reason. Meanwhile, among the remaining laboratory scientists, one is guaranteed to get cut (he wants to be), one is finishing law school at night (he'll leave), one has a military wife who was just reassigned across the country and who hasn't been living with her for two years because of her last assignment, and one is me. We may be getting a few new ones from the non-discovery research group, which is being dissolved next month. No idea how many they're keeping. I have my old department roster from when I started here several years ago, and I cross off names every time someone leaves. The list is very small now.
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Jun 18, 2011 14:38
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Sundae posted:I have my old department roster from when I started here several years ago, and I cross off names every time someone leaves. The list is very small now. I'm envisioning you in the future, crossing off your own name and turning the lights out as the last to leave.
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Jun 18, 2011 17:30
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Not sure if this is the right place to post, but I was wondering if anyone here works in Bioinformatics? I'm curious what your experiences have been like and what types of background fit for the kind of work. Just to give some background, I've worked in the health insurance industry for a bit and was always interested in breaking into the more research oriented side to it.
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Jun 19, 2011 00:54
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r1ngwthszzors posted:Not sure if this is the right place to post, but I was wondering if anyone here works in Bioinformatics? I'm curious what your experiences have been like and what types of background fit for the kind of work. All I know is that you generally need a masters in this area. I have a math/bio degree and am kind of curious myself. If anyone else wants to comment, feel free.
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Jun 20, 2011 23:20
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My department's BFFs with informatics, PM me with any specific questions. You're basically a data mining programmer that specializes in characterizing data. You get to make big trees of life and everyone will think you are boring. You also don't have to wear closed toe shoes. Also I'm in a hood turf war this week, hooray! Bastard Tetris fucked around with this message at 08:53 on Jun 21, 2011 |
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Jun 21, 2011 08:48
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Not a bioinformatician myself but I'm doing a project in a bioinformatics group (university) and maybe this is in some way useful to you. My impression is that as long as you're familiar with maths/statistics/R and are willing to adapt (read up on biological topics), you can work well in bioinformatics, and the boundaries between sub-fields within are a lot lower compared to biology. The background of the staff here varies immensely, we have a postdoc with a PhD in theoretical physics, a software engineer with "only" has a bachelors (who doesn't really read literature though), most grad students here have bio/biotech backgrounds, and the prof has a background in maths but moved towards bioinformatics via statistical genetics. They collaborate a lot with companies (many from food/agricultural), their focus of this lab here is all sorts of (epi)genomics and (quantitative trait loci) mapping and proteomics, but they also have people working inbetween here and the hospital (doing something with SNPs). Summary: biostatisticians are extremely versatile and appear to be quite sought-after. A master's degree is useful if you want to be more than "the programming guy", although it can also be in Maths or Physics and probably some engineering (a friend of mine went to bioinformatics after a space engineering undergrad). plasmoduck fucked around with this message at 09:28 on Jun 21, 2011 |
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Jun 21, 2011 09:26
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Just got out of a two-hour, brain-numbingly bad meeting. Our branch of the company has decided to adopt the Toyota A3 protocol to "become a learning organization". They have somehow decided, before ever trying it, that this will cut resource requirements across all facets of our work by 50%, including employee hours-needed. My favorite slides were 1) the one where they showed time-lines going from 48-91 days to 5-17 days for something that is never, EVER completed within the original window, and 2) the one announcing that since these timelines won't need as many people, we can expect a significant workforce reduction in the range of 50%.  This is going to backfire so badly.
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Jun 21, 2011 20:10
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Woo for new organizational guidelines! I now have to get any and all travel approved by business unit leaders (that's like VP-level and up here), I'm required to use my own car or public transportation (somehow, trains aren't counted as public transit), still have a dollar-value max on travel expenses, have to approve flights 6 months in advance, and our meal allowances have been significantly reduced. All travel within New York City should be by personal car or walking. Personal car mileage reimbursements reduced. No toll reimbursement. No on-job vehicle damage reimbursement. They specifically deny public transit in NYC. Go figure? All journal subscriptions are canceled immediately, we now have to get business unit leader approval for any training expenses (this won't happen) or mentoring arrangements. Retiree farewell meals cannot exceed travel meal-arrangements, and no non-employees (including the retiree's family) can be permitted to come. Award trips for field force top-sellers are reduced in value, and family members who want to go have to pay their own way. (The trip is only paid for for the seller himself.) Failure to use the trip on the assigned period forfeits the trip. We also have an announcement set for 10:00 today about the layoffs and reorganization. There is a strong rumor going around that the deal they were trying to pull over in the UK fell through, in which case there's going to be an awful lot of pain to spread around.
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Jun 23, 2011 14:04
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Sundae posted:Woo for new organizational guidelines! loving christ, I hope things turn out ok. Why the hate for the subway in NYC?Over here things are much calmer. We have various VPs in Sales and Production each fighting to add VP of Quality to their list of duties. I can't wait for the conflict of interest questions during the audits...
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Jun 23, 2011 14:29
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I don't know why all the hate for the subway or buses in NYC. They're amazing, and I guarantee this rule is going to be broken by thousands of employees. Our corporate headquarters is in NYC, and I guarantee you that they're 1) not loving driving in the city, and 2) aren't walking across the city in biz-attire in the middle of the summer. They're gonna be on the subway or in taxis. I'm going to be fine one way or another. If I get laid off, I have an awesome severance package, by my standards at least, waiting for me (it'll be roughly $33,000 after taxes + all my health/dental benefits for 12 months). If I don't get targeted, I've still got my job.
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Jun 23, 2011 14:42
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Second meeting's done here. We'll be getting a bunch of layoffs in late Aug / early Sept. They completely bungled the plan for the UK site, and as a result we're going to have a lot more layoffs here in USA to account for increased costs. In short, they wanted to lay off all the UK staff, sell the site to a CRO, and then contract the CRO to work for them while mandating that the CRO hire their old workers. This way, there would be no information-loss associated with transferring projects to the CRO, because everyone who worked on the projects before would be working on the projects after. No CRO in their right mind is going to do that, of course. That's asinine. Not only would it destroy their internal business models, but it would saturate them with (in their view) untested employees who are CLEARLY too expensive. How do you know they're too expensive? Because someone's trying to sell them to you and then immediately contract them from you. If they were worth their price-tag in the company's view, the company wouldn't be trying to foist them off on you. So end result seems to be that we found no takers, are laying off a few thousand (leaving ~350 behind at that enormous site), and eating the cost differences until we can find a buyer for the site. Once that's found, we'd sell the site and then lease particular buildings in it to hold our workers. 
Sundae fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Jun 23, 2011 |
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Jun 23, 2011 16:42
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Your posts continue to amaze... sounds like PFE is being run by, well, retards or maybe monkeys.
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Jun 23, 2011 19:48
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Or monkeys that are retarded.
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Jun 23, 2011 19:52
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PFE's fucktarded management is the reason I stayed out of Pharma. Trip report: Our insanely toxic volatile organic experiments haven't poisoned anyone or lit my lab on fire yet! YAY Also I don't know if I should be worried that half of my entire business unit's capital purchases this quarter have my name on them. The business heads are all like "make this place world-class" and we have the budget, so  LET'S GET REALLY loving SWEET INCUBATORS
Bastard Tetris fucked around with this message at 06:00 on Jun 29, 2011 |
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Jun 29, 2011 05:54
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Bastard Tetris posted:PFE's fucktarded management is the reason I stayed out of Pharma. There is no shame in a good incubator.
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Jun 29, 2011 06:24
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These incubators can autoclave themselves, are insulated with aerogel, and have 5x the access speed of our old incubators. They're replacing an incubator that was bought when I was 12 years old.
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Jun 29, 2011 07:52
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Bastard Tetris posted:These incubators can autoclave themselves, are insulated with aerogel, and have 5x the access speed of our old incubators. Oh yeah? Well, my stability ovens sometimes have working temperature controls! (Are you hiring?)
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Jun 29, 2011 14:39
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Bastard Tetris posted:These incubators can autoclave themselves, are insulated with aerogel, and have 5x the access speed of our old incubators. Whatever, real scientists use older autoclaves without performing checks for cracks. Seriously, I didn't know those existed, drat!
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Jun 29, 2011 14:55
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I've been trying to convince my PI for months to get a new self-autoclaving incubator. Our current incubator grows more fungus than neurons. Cleaning doesn't help because it just takes one missed spore and they all come back. Edit: Buy a nanodrop and a Millipore SNAP ID western blotting machine and I'll come work for you immediately, no questions asked. polyfractal fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Jun 29, 2011 |
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Jun 29, 2011 19:31
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Bastard Tetris posted:PFE's fucktarded management is the reason I stayed out of Pharma. We (I'm the LIMS guy) work with a lot of mid size pharma and they seem to be doing pretty well right now. For some reason the ones I'm dealing with have all seemed to be clustered out on the west coast. It's a shame to hear what's going on with big pharma as PFE and Merck are two of our biggest customers. Bastard Tetris posted:Trip report: Our insanely toxic volatile organic experiments haven't poisoned anyone or lit my lab on fire yet! YAY What kind of information outputs do your new fancy incubators give? Will you be interfacing them with your LIMS? For a lot of BioBanking/Life Sciences we monitor freeze/thaw cycles for samples using an interface to the storage unit, I don't think we've currently interfaced with any incubators but we could.
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Jun 29, 2011 21:19
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Lyon posted:What kind of information outputs do your new fancy incubators give? Will you be interfacing them with your LIMS? For a lot of BioBanking/Life Sciences we monitor freeze/thaw cycles for samples using an interface to the storage unit, I don't think we've currently interfaced with any incubators but we could. These have really standard outputs, temp/gas monitoring, inventory checking, and alarm updates to my phone. They could LIMS integrate really easily. And yes, we are hiring- PM me for details.
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Jun 30, 2011 07:06
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Sundae posted:Second meeting's done here. We'll be getting a bunch of layoffs in late Aug / early Sept. They completely bungled the plan for the UK site, and as a result we're going to have a lot more layoffs here in USA to account for increased costs. Holy poo poo. I wonder what the thought process of these executives is, if there even is one. Almost as if they want to fail. I completed my PhD in molecular biology last year and got the hell out of science. I was lucky and able to find a job in government administrating research programs. Government has its own share of issues, but after grad studies, the job market, and seeing just how colossally poorly managed companies can gently caress things up, I'm glad I got out. My future would have been endless post-docs, I'm afraid. I like to think I was a decent researcher, but I think I'm a much better administrator. Plus now I don't have to do anymore Westerns or clone genes that don't want to clone. Ugh, I had a construct that should have taken 1 week to assemble that ended up taking almost 6 months. What a pain in the rear end.
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Jun 30, 2011 13:44
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Vasler! My new best friend... I need to talk to you. I was just given a new task of looking for new opportunities within the federal government. I'm in the LIMS industry, is this something you'd have some insight into?
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Jun 30, 2011 14:24
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We've been given new numbers now for the reductions in my department. We're expecting a 40-50% overall reduction, with a 75% reduction in what few laboratory scientists remain in my department. Based on those numbers, we're going to have somewhere between one and two laboratory scientists remaining when it's all said and done. Perhaps one full scientist and a lonely torso rolling around the wet lab? On actual sciencey topics, does anyone have ideas for getting nanoparticles out of suspension without a spray-dryer, cyclonic separator, or any filters small enough to catch 100 nm diameters? I must confess that I am stumped. I guess I could leave it to air-dry, but that's not particularly ideal either. I'd prefer something that won't take a week and potentially cause larger agglomeration issues.
Sundae fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Jul 6, 2011 |
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Jul 6, 2011 18:52
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I'm going to be graduating with a BS in Microbiology next spring. I will have a year off before I start dental school. How difficult is it to find a decent lab job for that amount of time? Any pointers on where to start the search? Doesn't really matter where in the US (preferably cheap living, closer to CA) I want to know as much as I can early on so I don't waste time.
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Jul 6, 2011 20:25
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First, don't tell anyone you're doing it to fill a 1-year gap unless it's a temp-position / contract position already. If it is a known thing that you're applying for a 9-mo or 1-yr position, then it can possibly be beneficial. Otherwise, keep your mouth shut. The general belief is that it takes a year or more to train you in the first place (total bullshit, but what more can you expect from HR?), so if they knew you were immediately going to leave, they'd not bother with you. This is especially true given you're in microbio, so you're going to be competing against every laid-off biotech employee for the last three years. Your situation might be one of the few situations where I actually recommend looking at CROs. Most of them loving suck for long-term career ambitions / give you jack poo poo in the way of benefits beyond health insurance, but they'll give you a year of experience and pay your bills. They will be more or less monotonous labwork for their customers, so don't expect an attachment to your project or anything. I might recommend looking at them because you're already planning on not staying there. Think of it as the difference between being the college kid working at JC Penny during the summer, and the 45 yr-old working with you who has been there for over a decade. The college kid is hopefully just passing through, whereas the 45 yr-old has stalled out and is probably miserable. Don't stay at your CRO, but it can be perfectly suitable in the short-term. Look at http://www.biospace.com/ and http://www.newscientistjobs.com for starters. The second one seems cheesy, but believe it or not, you can find some decent jobs through it. That's where I found my current job (the job is decent, it's just that my company is collapsing). On Biospace, check out the regional company lists for more information, check their job boards, and then go to the actual websites for companies in your region. If you want to do a bit more in-person stuff, Biospace also lists regional job fairs for sciences. If you're in California, you should have plenty of them around unless things have changed drastically since I last looked. Good luck in dental school! Edit: quote:preferably cheap living, closer to CA Cheap + California? Is this even possible? Sundae fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Jul 6, 2011 |
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Jul 6, 2011 20:53
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Seyelence posted:I'm going to be graduating with a BS in Microbiology next spring. I will have a year off before I start dental school. You might try looking for a job in a university research lab. Same as industry, many PIs won't hire for just a single year so don't tell them that. Most research techs get university benefits which is pretty sweet, despite the horrible pay. Finding academic lab jobs is a lot more work though since rarely are they posted on Monster or Biospace or whatever. You often have to hunt through the HR page of each university
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Jul 6, 2011 21:04
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polyfractal posted:You might try looking for a job in a university research lab. Same as industry, many PIs won't hire for just a single year so don't tell them that. Most research techs get university benefits which is pretty sweet, despite the horrible pay. New to this thread. Its been great therapy. I work in an academic lab and they are always hiring for one year stints. If a PI gets a grant for a year and need three minions to help out the grad student, they like to go hire three fresh graduates for a year. Now finding these jobs may be hard, most of them are given out to people the PI's know or have worked with as students. I would go volunteer in a lab and if you actually work and get things done its an almost guaranteed job. We get so many fuckups though who are only here to boost their resume and could give a poo poo about what they are doing that most unknown people are not trusted by the other minions/lab rats.
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Jul 6, 2011 22:21
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In my academic carrier, I have worked for two PIs. I will start out with my first one. We will call him Dr.  to protect the guilty. Dr. is all about the money. He literally turned out 4-5 grant applications a month, at least one a week. The only time he was not working on grant applications was when he was on one of his side jobs. Dr. would just disappear for a month or two to go start up a company and go to VC’s for money. He is absolutely determined to become a millionaire, and he is ready to do anything necessary. This includes lying to funding agencies and collaborators, investors, and straight out stealing of intellectual and real property. Do to Dr. ’s prolific grant writing in his never ending quest of money, his lab could literally use  ’s instead of Kimwipes. The flip side of this coin was that he ran graduate students off left and right, so there were only six to eight graduate students at any given time. When I left we have 53 grants and 7 graduate students. That meant that for EACH grad student we were responsible for seven to eight grants. The short version of the story is that nothing got done. Quarterly reports would come around and it was time to break out the bull poo poo machine. You would look at the last one and see what the goals for that quarter were, then say you met them and make up ones for the next quarter. To back this up Dr. would “leverage” data from similar projects by just changing figures and axis on graphs to support whatever this grant was supposed to be. Real progress was made on less than a quarter of our grants. This was actually the precipitous of my leaving. I refused to submit outright false quarterly reports and since I picked the “wrong team” I was let go. It took me less than 30 minutes to have an offer for a full RA appointment in another lab.Collaborators were the worst to deal with. Dr. would tell them what good progress we were making, make all kinds of promises about things that could not be delivered, and then WE would have to go to meetings without any knowledge of what he had told them and basically apologize that we actually had done no work on anything because we were told to focus on something else. I know Dr. told you we were working on it, but haven’t you figured out he is full of poo poo by now?The only way that he keeps getting money is that he is a super politician. He was involved with EVERYTHING… There is nothing on his department that he does not have influence over. If you want to get anything done, you have to work with him. I don’t understand how people don’t just boycott him because he screws EVERYONE. Most just seem too stupid to realize it. If you can’t replicate his work, your just not trying as hard as he was, did something wrong, or are just not smart enough (it has nothing to do with the fact we probably just made it all up anyway, it SOUNDED like it might work). Worst six months of my life :p
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Jul 7, 2011 02:10
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Any hospital or clinical lab techs in this thread? What kind of diagnostic monoclonals do you guys use?
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Jul 10, 2011 15:37
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So, I just recently graduated with my BS in Physics. I've been looking around for jobs, and it seems like even lab positions want a not-insignificant amount of experience. Am I basically hosed for finding a job that does anything with my degree if I don't pursue further education?
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Jul 11, 2011 20:51
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bairfanx posted:So, I just recently graduated with my BS in Physics. I've been looking around for jobs, and it seems like even lab positions want a not-insignificant amount of experience. Am I basically hosed for finding a job that does anything with my degree if I don't pursue further education? Where are you looking? Location may be a huge factor.
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Jul 11, 2011 20:55
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bairfanx posted:So, I just recently graduated with my BS in Physics. I've been looking around for jobs, and it seems like even lab positions want a not-insignificant amount of experience. Am I basically hosed for finding a job that does anything with my degree if I don't pursue further education? I'm in the same situation with a BS in chemistry, the best leads that I've gotten were 1 year-ish lab tech positions at universities. The NewScientist site that sundae posted above has a section for physics as well, but I dunno how useful it might be for you.
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Jul 11, 2011 21:05
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Vladimir Putin posted:Where are you looking? Location may be a huge factor. I'm open to anywhere that will take me, honestly. That said, I'm in central Illinois right now and have been looking around at Chicagoland job postings, as well as St. Louis. One of my professors suggested looking into companies situated in research parks, and I've found a cache of businesses that don't seem to post in many of the job sites I've searched, which is giving me some hope. I see jobs that I'm qualified for up until the mandatory employment experience (which seems to be the hallmark catch-22 of finding a job). I'm planning to take the physics GRE this fall, with the hopes of getting my PhD in materials, but it would be awesome to have a job doing something I like (and in an ideal world, I'd like to pay off a chunk of my loans before I go to grad school). edit: also, nil on the research experience, but I took a May term class wherein I spent ~65 hours a week in the lab/working on lab work and reports and liked it so much that I did it again (because the experiments changed each year, my school allows us to take it multiple times). Okay, "liked" is a strong word, as it was kind of hellish, but it was worth it both times. It's not the same as research, but I figure it at least shows that I know how to work my rear end off. bairfanx fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Jul 11, 2011 |
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Jul 11, 2011 21:05
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majestic12 posted:I'm in the same situation with a BS in chemistry, the best leads that I've gotten were 1 year-ish lab tech positions at universities. The NewScientist site that sundae posted above has a section for physics as well, but I dunno how useful it might be for you. I'm the same as you, but there's a good amount out there for bachelor's level chemists, provided that you're willing to move. You should dig through Indeed, LinkedIn, and maybe even your local Craigslist more. I'm currently waiting on a decision from a nanomaterials startup in Madison that I'm completely stoked for, and I'd never have found it if it weren't for Indeed because the guy hiring basically only posted on a Research Triangle area job board. This job better work out. I'm so sick of applying. zilong fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Jul 14, 2011 |
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Jul 14, 2011 03:36
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