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Any of the people looking for jobs in the US: have any experience in field service/chromatography products? And I have to laugh at that pfizer gently caress up.. c'mon guys.
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Feb 2, 2012 15:50
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seacat posted:
This entire post and especially this part is spot on. I had the exact same experience as you, organic synth undergrad experience and everything. Shortly after graduating (spring 08) I got hired on doing field support and the combination of undergrad organic chemistry and computer skills has served me really well. I also completely lucked out to find a good company that managed to keep growing even at the worst point in the recession. I've been able to walk in to every kind of lab.. all of the big pharma places like PFE as well as literally run down houses converted into contract testing labs. I can't tell you how many times I've been working in a crappy lab much like the ones I interviewed at while looking for a job and you can just tell everyone is bored and miserable.. the desperation in their eyes as they ask if my company is hiring or if I know of other labs that are hiring. To reiterate seacat's awesome post the best advice for anyone just starting out is a) if you're still in school you need to be doing undergraduate research it is hands down the best thing you can do for your career and imo at least in my case despite my project being crappy it was very fulfilling and taught me more about work than any class ever could. b) Do something that makes you happy. You're going to have to spend thousands of hours doing it, you're probably not going to start out doing what you ultimately want to do, and frankly if you're a workaholic type you'll be waking up with the first thought in your brain something stressful about work. That will drive you nuts if its not something you can enjoy. ascii genitals fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Feb 4, 2012 |
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Feb 4, 2012 22:37
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TouchyMcFeely posted:I know this is the laboratory chat but for folks looking for work and are interested in the instrumentation service side of things it looks like my company is hiring field service engineers in different locations around the US. Haha I wonder if we work for the same company.
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Feb 5, 2012 16:00
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TouchyMcFeely posted:If it rhymes with DerkinSelmer (yeah, I got nothin'), you might be right! Ah nope, I guess things are looking up everywhere though  . Had a phone meeting friday and apparently we're hiring 20-30 people across the US this year. I work for a small company that does a lot of field service work for Smagilent.
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Feb 5, 2012 17:13
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TouchyMcFeely posted:I wonder if it's because we're so busy trying to tell everyone how well we can work on each others equipment. Haha yeah I hate the 3rd party stuff so much. I only have to work on my own stuff but I have a coworker who spends most of her time on Shimadzu instruments and she hates it. I was working along side a Waters guy recently and he was lamenting it. Whoever came up with 'all inclusive' lab service contracts is a loving moron. The customer pays essentially full price for a service contract and expects the level of response and knowledge they would get from the instrument manufacturer. When the run of the mill service is done they probably do a decent job, but the problem is repairs. There ARE small outfits that can do this, but they don't have nearly as many clients and probably don't promise the world. Stuff gets billed to us as a non-contract repair, so rather than being able to order all the parts that could be needed you get some bullshit estimation of how much it should cost and how long it should take. Plus since every FSE is busy as hell a non-contract repair obviously isn't going to jump to the front of the line in front of contract repairs. Everything is always a crisis when an instrument goes down, at least 90% of the time the company only has one of that instrument or it is critical to the operation of the whole facility something equally short sighted. No one wants to wait, so now everyone involved is unhappy because some idiot tried to save $10,000. ascii genitals fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Feb 5, 2012 |
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Feb 5, 2012 18:50
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I've been doing this about 3.5 years and also enjoy it. Your basic university job sounds a lot like the daily type of stuff you run into as an FSE. Most of the time the problem is something simple. Once you work on a certain instrument for awhile and learn it's quirks it becomes pretty easy. Especially when you can call a coworker or the (good) tech support people when you get stuck, that is the really valuable part. All of my coworkers have been doing this for like 20 years. The travel is not that exciting, most of the time when you're done for the day you just want to get home and even when I'm staying overnight somewhere I'm usually tired enough that I don't want to go out. I bought a new car in July 2010 and already have 68,000 miles (reimbursed for expenses and everything but still.. its a lot of time driving.) It IS nice to be outside driving and not stuck in the lab all the time. I listen to lots of audiobooks and podcasts, I'm so acclimated to driving now that 3 hrs in a day feels normal. I enjoy being able to visit so many different types of labs, good and bad. If you're observant you can usually figure out what makes a place successful (or hugely unsuccessful.) When I was just starting out I did some work for an older guy who was really fascinating. He had been doing mass spectrometry for 30 years and had an incredible amount of knowledge. I wasn't as busy back then (during the recession) and after I was done with my work I wound up staying for a few hours off the clock as he showed me all of his crazy customized instrumentation and talked about all the projects he had worked on. I also work out of my house and rarely see my coworkers. The pay is decent and the flexibility is a double edged sword. During the holidays for example all my customers tend to go on vacation, so I'm able to hang out and not do much. The opposite can be true though, I've worked a few weekends and holidays. With all the driving I tend to get lots of overtime, last year I made an additional 25-30% of my salary in overtime. I don't know how much room there is for advancement within this job, even switching to an application engineer position where you help customers actually make their chemistry work is pretty slim. Those positions seem to be going away. That said, being able to fix pretty much any problem on several types of instruments would be really valuable. I could see moving into a training or consulting position, if you like teaching but want to get paid more than academia and not publish there are certainly small niches. I've got to drive 3 hrs to do a dumb thing but can write more later. PM me if you want free tech support Haha. ascii genitals fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Feb 6, 2012 |
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Feb 6, 2012 14:24
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Phosphene posted:We restarted a pc today and no one we could reach knew the password to get back into the computer so we couldn't use that instrument today. How does this happen. This is actually really common. Can't tell you how many hours I've spent waiting around in various labs waiting for someone to find a password or a software license. Easily hundreds of hours.
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May 20, 2018 17:56
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At least the software I support considers the instrument to be a big ol dongle and doesn't have a required license. Still have to pay for the software even if you spend half a million on the hardware though!
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May 20, 2018 18:48
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Shrieking Muppet posted:One of the things that has made me laugh is that for about four years we have had empower 3 licenses that we are paying for but the system still has not been set up. Waters is making loving bank on Empower upgrades. They have a huge chunk of the regulated market. It blows my mind how bad most CDS are.. Empower is the gold standard for "compliant" software and it is a hideous pain. The best is dealing with the bizarre quirks of blended systems, if you run an Agilent GC with Empower there are instrument drivers available from both Agilent and Empower. I heard something the other day about dual tower simultaneous injection working in one driver but not the other. Sigh.. Multivendor stuff is the worst. ascii genitals fucked around with this message at 17:36 on May 27, 2018 |
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May 27, 2018 17:34
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Shrieking Muppet posted:Ill see how much it matters in the past my resume was tossed into the shredder for not having empower or HPLC anywhere on it so i view my time in NMR as a loss I would have to explain. All my experience in college was NMR and liquid (gravity) chromatography and I switched to GCMS for my career. It's a totally different technique but the fundamentals of chromatography and structure identification carry over at least. Most of the people who put empower experience on their resume just know how to build a sequence or some poo poo, it's not like they're actually administrating or installing stuff. Nice experience to have, but not critical.
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Jun 7, 2018 01:18
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Shrieking Muppet posted:Smart rear end answer: Id like to abandon science completely and sell hotdogs from a cart Started as a field service engineer, now working in a very fulfilling job as the top level support engineer for my product---writing support documentation, helping software engineers understand what scientists actually want, helping with escalations that make it to the top. Other paths in this direction would be application engineer, or horizontal moves into sales, marketing, R&D etc. As a field service engineer I got boat loads of training, and also exposure to lots of different companies. I've done work for basically every major pharma company, government and academic labs, little start ups, manufacturing sites etc.
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Jun 7, 2018 12:48
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Shrieking Muppet posted:Hahahahaha that would require my hell hole to use guard columns "we don't use guard columns" is the "poo poo, I forgot to even plug it in" of the chromatography world It is much better to dedicate a system to an analysis than to move methods around. If you used the same cook top to make a bunch of hamburgers and then you cook an omlette, that poo poo is gonna taste like hamburger.
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Nov 22, 2018 02:58
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goodness posted:Maybe if you don't clean it. Have you ever had a cast iron meal taste like previous food? I haven't. Actually in the case of cast iron it is more of an example of the good passivation that occurs in a well used, well maintained instrument. I suppose a better analogy would be heating up a fish in a plastic Tupperware dish every day and then using the same Tupperware to store donuts .There are just so many reasons to either dedicate an instrument to an application, or at least have spare capacity in case an instrument goes down. I wouldn't want to run residual solvents on the same GC that is used to do a pesticide analysis.
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Dec 6, 2018 12:04
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Edit: woops wrong thread.
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Feb 14, 2019 05:22
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On the other side, I work trying to convince software engineers to create a bare minimum feature set for compliance on GCMS. I'm trying, and I'm so so sorry.
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Mar 22, 2019 21:38
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C-Euro posted:How many goons do we have here who work for instrument manufacturers? I'm a chemist looking to get back into a more lab-focused role after spinning my wheels in a regulatory position for a few years. I had a good but unsuccessful interview with an instrument manufacturer last fall for a role that sounded like a mashup of Sales and Technical Support. Basically customers who were already interested in purchasing something would come to them and they'd talk through their research needs and figure out the best instrument from the catalog. Customers would also send samples for the company to test on their in-house instruments to help the decision-making process, and once a quarter the role would road-trip to visit customers on-site for a couple of days. Is that kind of an atypical position, or does that line up with the goons who are in instrumentation? GC/MS former field support, now top level support for gcms software and yeah this sounds very typical. I don't know how all manufacturers do it but we have pre-sales and post sales application support. Mostly pre sales, which means they wind up doing at least some % post sales support out of necessity to do right for the customer. It is a very nice career. You get the inside info, but you still interact with real scientists and not just marketing/sales bozos.
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May 25, 2019 17:56
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Shrieking Muppet posted:What sort of experience is needed to make the jump to instrument fixer? I'm sick of working in the lab and am thinking of going back to school for IT security but staying on the edges of science seems like something i could make a living at without having to spend money on school. I started with a BS degree in Chemistry and some experience doing column chromatography to purify reaction mixtures as part of my undergrad research. I also had experience fixing computers and doing network stuff - - nothing incredible, just standard nerd skills like understanding what IP addresses are and how to troubleshoot. I was very willing to work a ton (50,000ish miles per year, about 30% of my base salary in OT.) When I first started I did a lot of the lovely calls to gain the favor of my more experienced coworkers. They really helped me a lot, it was a great team to work with. I moved up and up and eventually applied for a job up at the factory and moved out of the field. I still work within the support organization and so I work closely with field service all over the planet, instead of just my colleagues in the US. I spend a lot of time giving them advice and assisting with escalations, I also work with R&D / application scientists. You must be able to communicate well. You must be flexible. Good field service engineers act as traveling lab psychologists. You need to be a good shoulder to cry on, and you also have to work with a lot of on-the-spectrum scientists who are for sure working far away from the general public for a reason. In my opinion field service is a great career path even if your ultimate goal it to work in sales, marketing, or management. You need to be a bit hosed up in the head to do field service, PARTICULARLY if you do it for 20+ years. I did the job for 10 years before moving into my current role. A field service job is easier to start in than an application engineer/sales product specialist role. If you went right for the job you described I would try again w field service and do it for at least a few years. If you're good at your job you will pick up a lot of useful knowledge and will be able to provide application help in addition to being a lab janitor (doing maintenance, repairs, installs etc.) ascii genitals fucked around with this message at 04:09 on May 26, 2019 |
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May 26, 2019 04:05
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Agilent also tends to train people too fast and on too much, but they're trying to improve that. It depends a lot on your local management. If they are smart they will send you to training and then do a good amount of mentoring before just throwing you out there. You've always got support, it can just seem like you're on your own. It also depends geographically because if you're in the Midwest you may need to cover more products simply because there are fewer service engineers covering a big area. Whereas in say Boston it would be easier to specialize someone on just LCMS or just atomic spectsocopy, or whatever. I was a generalist but mainly did GC, gcms, GC headspace etc. Some LC but not as much. For all the bullshit it's a very good job and a very good company. ascii genitals fucked around with this message at 02:21 on May 27, 2019 |
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May 26, 2019 14:06
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Haha I don't remember  I set the avatar a couple years ago. It was something random I liked because it was a nice mix of functional groups. I remember it was just a piece of something much larger.If you guys have more questions about field service or application engineer stuff feel free to PM.
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May 27, 2019 14:18
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I am glad this is causing so much frustration lmao. It definitely is some snippet of a big natural product but I have no idea what I took it from.
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May 29, 2019 15:24
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You've cracked the case!!!! I did some research with stuff that binds to the site so that makes sense.
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May 30, 2019 12:39
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C-Euro posted:I do remember that PM and I might still have it lol. Yeah my main apprehension with this field is having to travel a bunch at a time when my wife and I are planning to have a child. However, the phone screen today made it sound like the travel area for the role is much smaller than I previously assumed and I can set my own road schedule with some flexibility (and work from home the rest of the time), which sounds much more tenable. I had a lot of coworkers with kids, I also had a few divorced coworkers lol. If your wife hates the idea of you being gone say 1 or 2 nights a week don't take the job. This really depends on employer as well as the current workload. Some months I didn't stay in a hotel once, others I was gone for 2 weeks. Even if you don't actually have to stay overnight keep in mind these are not 9-5 jobs.
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Jun 13, 2019 00:00
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I was a great FSE and I don't change tires. I take my car in for regular maintenance and let someone who knows about cars work on it. If I have a blow out I call AAA. If they asked me how to change a tire I would have had a really dumb answer lmao. That's annoying as hell that they won't give you a realistic/accurate idea of how much travel there is, but that tends to be common.
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Jun 26, 2019 10:35
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I don't do a lot of lcms but ab sciex ms with an Agilent lc seems like what you are looking for.
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Oct 12, 2019 17:38
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Cardiac posted:Just spent the afternoon with a LC MS operator on a Sciex MS and the interface was very much clicking with the mouse, which gets old fast with 1000+ compounds. What part are you trying to automate? Same analytical method with different compounds, trying to automate the identification? Same compounds different concentrations?
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Oct 23, 2019 15:49
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Generally you can set a data system to spit out integration RT, abundance, and some other information as excel (csv or better yet tsv.) I don't know Analyst software so I don't know how to recommend the exact steps. Is this lcms single quad, tandem quad, or some accurate mass stuff? Keep in mind lcms sq libraries of spectra dont really exist like it would for gcms (because the spectra is dependant on ion optics that will differ instrument to instrument.) If it is ms/ms or accurate mass you can identify based on mrm or product ion scan, accurate mass can go by fragment masses. You'd need to find either the MRM / MS/MS information, or the exact mass info, for all your compounds or acquire it yourself. Once you run it on your lc method youll also have the RT. For automation you really need the precise RT as well as the MS specific info. Once you figure this stuff out you may find you want to automate creation of the sequence to acquire the data. This can usually be done by exporting a csv or some other excel based method of generating a sample list.
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Oct 23, 2019 18:24
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If you define the RT of a compound as the entire run time, meaning you set the MS to look for ions of a mass characteristic to your compound (MRMs, SIM, product ion scan whatever), you will limit the number of total compounds you can analyze in a single run. Unlike GC or LC there is an opportunity cost (time) associated with detection. This is why triggered MRM exists, you look for one high abundance MRM for a compound and if you get a hit, start looking for additional confirmatory MRMs for a few seconds. Unfortunately for gcms the peak shape is sharper so there is less time to detect the primary mrm and trigger the secondary MRMs while still getting sufficient sampling rate... I have no actual experience using tMRM but I know it exists to try and optimize the number of MRMs that can be run at one time. There's no free lunch though: tMRM with have some consequences on performance for lcms for the reason mentioned above. Screening for hundreds of compounds can be done, but you need to have the RTs in order to narrow the time range where you are attempting to detect a compound to something like RT +/- 0.2 minutes. In this case it would be realistic to screen for 200-250 compounds in a 20 minute chromatographic run. I have seen that 20 min run get optimized down to 5 or 10 min, but you wouldn't just start with that. If you can get it down to a 5 minute run you could screen for 1000 compounds by rerunning the same sample multiple times with different methods, but this would still just be screening no quantitation. ascii genitals fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Oct 24, 2019 |
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Oct 24, 2019 20:16
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Yep it's the travel. Nearly everyone eventually moves to another role or changes careers. I had a couple coworkers leave and go teach or write a book---burned out entirely. It is a great job though. You make tons of connections, hone your people skills, etc etc.
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Oct 26, 2019 17:45
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More acquisition softwares need a well documented api/sdk. Automating acq method a and sequence file creation is a hot topic. I recently worked on a MRM optimizer that automatically creates product ion scan and mrm methods, but it's for method development not actually collecting new data. ascii genitals fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Oct 26, 2019 |
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Oct 26, 2019 17:47
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Now I'm really curious, I've worked for a ton of companies in that area. Hmmm so much bench space... Another clue?? Anyone who is interested: it is a very nice area and he is right, cost of living is amazing compared to what you may be used to.
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Nov 17, 2019 03:02
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Epitope posted:As far as I can tell in our version of masshunter the only way to view a running sequence is to click edit. Then, if you forget to exit out of edit mode, the run crashes. GCMS or LCMS? And what version?
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Jul 24, 2021 16:02
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Epitope posted:10.0.368 Are you in a validated environment (ie, can we try anything with the software or would this be a nightmare?) I wonder if you actually have MH Acq 10 SR1 and someone forgot to install the service release--there is a folder on the usb with a 2nd installer that should be run after setup.exe that has a few bug fixes (this would change your build to 10.0.384.) There was at least one live sequence edit issue for PAL3 fixed in SR1, I would need to look closer to see if that also touched headspace. It should not be a problem to open the sequence table editor and have that open while the sequence is running. Headspace and PAL3 can be a bit more tricky because of sample overlap logic, but that still doesn't sound right to me. As far as differences for sequencing for a headspace.. if you were to pause the sequence it would finish the current injection AND do the next injection before the pause takes effect. Also for headspace if you were to edit the sequence while it was running to insert more lines I suppose there are certain cases where it might screw up.. but simply opening the sequence table and keeping it open should not cause a problem. Before the sequence actually starts a silent 'simulate sequence' is done, so if you just want to see the contents of the table take a look at d:\masshunter\gcms\1\simulate_sequence.log as a sort-of workaround. If you want to look into this more just send me a PM.
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Jul 27, 2021 22:52
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Epitope posted:^^ boss trying to murder y'all Well, SR1 is worth a shot--it only takes a minute or two to install. Just look for MHGCMSAcq_10.0_SR1.exe on the installer media.. run that. It might make you point it to the original installer, just have that USB plugged in. If it doesn't help let me know. I don't get paid to post, but I do post to live. I'm glad the support has been good for you, I agree it's so important... I came from the field myself, now I work on the team that makes MH GCMS Acq and it's really interesting getting to work with the people who actually make this stuff.
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Jul 29, 2021 03:19
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mllaneza posted:The Venn diagram of people well-versed in Windows software development best practices, and those who know what a mass spectrometer even loving is looks like a diagram of the earth and the moon. There is overlap but the person who knows about both MS and software development is a 70 year old BOFH sys-op californian republican who will only code in notepad quote:Both vendors are annoying as hell during setup for a new instrument. Waters techs are probably less competent, but Thermo's people are more stubborn. Both are apparently trained to treat antivirus software as the cause of literally everything wrong. I had a Waters tech swear herself blue for a week that SEP was breaking the Oracle database . A week during which SEP wasn't installed - ODBC was configured wrong, by the tech. Another one, just last week, refused to continue setup because she couldn't perform the step where she grants her apps access through the Windows Defender firewall - it was TURNED OFF. They ended up botching driver install so bad we had to re-image the machine. And these were the techs that showed up for their appointments. To be fair, antivirus and network printers cause like 90% of problems. ascii genitals fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Aug 6, 2021 |
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Aug 6, 2021 01:56
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Dik Hz posted:Speaking as someone who had a forced IT update brick a mass spec, the techs are correct. If a computer is hooked up to a mass spec, it should not be connected to a network. All antivirus and firewall should be nuked. Customer wants to acquire 600 MB data files and send them to amazon web services over an internet connection instead of just ANALYZING THE DATA ON THE MOTHERFUCKING ACQUISTIION PC LIKE A NORMAL PERSON. They have 0 tolerance for interruptions oh also they want to lock the PC down with all sorts of domain security restrictions since a computer is just a computer if it works for sales it will work for a data acquisition pc. "Hi,, hello, I tried to load 50 blue ray movie loving data files and it took a few minutes to open--I'm furious please solve this"
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Aug 6, 2021 01:57
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I went to the labware hq a few years ago to work with them and they have this beautiful bar w beer on tap for employees, and a bunch of fancy coffee machines. Lucky bastards.
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Oct 21, 2021 15:48
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I went into industry w a BS and started making money 4-5 years before my friends who went to grad or professional school. Worked out well for me.. I agree: if you want to combine tech and chemistry just go straight to industry.
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Nov 10, 2021 21:33
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IT switched us from webex to teams, but previously got rid of our desk phones and webex was used for phone calls. Now that doesn't work anymore and there's no cell reception in the building so I guess we just don't use phones anymore.
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Jul 21, 2023 09:43
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