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Man, I heard PFE was a bad place to work, but my god. I also work for a large pharma based out of NJ (not merck), and can give a slightly less jaded view of the industry from a company that is actually trying to develop drugs instead of just acquisitions. I work in API scale-up as a process engineer, but work directly with the organic chemists, analytical scientists, and forumlation groups, so I have a pretty broad range of exposure if people want any ideas. I'm also a university recruiter, so I can answer questions about getting your foot in the door - it's tough, we just laid off ~10% of the dept, so no open reqs, but even in a good year we were hiring 10 people between the enginers and chemists. I do agree that the industry is in a terrible shape, and the future isn't really clear. But, given the rate of totally gently caress ups from companies in India and China, and basically any outsourced vendor, I should have a job for a few more years. I just can't see us filing anything based solely on outsourced development work.
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Apr 11, 2011 02:53
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Sundae posted:If you get a company that cares about doing research, it's great. If you get one of the acquisition-nutty companies or the companies that are directly reliant on them (sadly, a fuckton fall into that category), you're in for a hard time. Best PFE quote I heard at a conference: "I hope they talk to the Wyeth guys before they lay them off". I count my self luck that I'm at my company. It's great to actually do research. We'll see what happens long term. In 5-10 years, as these companies in India and China get better, it'll really become a problem. Especially considering many of these laid off scientists are going back home to work for these companies at a huge pay increase and reduced cost of living.
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Apr 11, 2011 12:48
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seacat posted:Also it seems the volume of poo poo we're required to record on our paperwork doubles every 6 months. I can understand lot numbers and expiration dates of important chemicals, but indicators? Balance calibration dates? Really? I love that we have a fancy electronic lab notebook system, but if you include a notebook reference to an experiment in anything that might be audited, you have to print out a pdf of the experiment and include it in the paperwork. Makes you wonder what the point of a paperless system is. gninjagnome fucked around with this message at 11:37 on May 5, 2011 |
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May 5, 2011 11:33
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The department is also footing the bill for your tuition as well - based on a quick look could range from $5,000- $25,000/year. You really should consider that into any salary discussion as well. You're still better off then if you were trying to get a PhD in history or something. I remember they were trying to unionize the grad students at my university and all the science and engineering students refused to help because they would have taken a pay cut and reduction of benefits. You can't just look at the income while getting the degree. Getting a PhD is necessary for certain long term career goals in industry and a requirement if you want to be a professor. I can't imagine anyone without a PhD becoming an associate director or higher in the R&D group at my company. I don't have a PhD, but 80% of my department does - it took me 8 years to work my way up to the level of an entry level PhD in my company, which puts me about 3 years behind them. Also, they start off with a higher base salary then my current salary by at least $10K, and after 3 years of working, would have been promoted at least once - in this case the promotions is a pretty big bump in benefits (doubling of targeted bonus and start of getting stock options). It's at least 3-5 years before I would get promoted to that level (and I'm now directly competing with them for promotions). I did get to make more money for the 5 years they were in school, but I have a good 35 working years ahead of me, so they will still net more money over their career, especially if they end up in management positions that I am blocked out of. Being a post doc isn't supposed to be a career either - it's to pad your resume so you're more marketable afterwards. Your trying to publish as many papers as possible or learn new techniques, not make a ton of money. Jobs wise - it sucks for everyone out there, PhD or not. gninjagnome fucked around with this message at 12:47 on May 7, 2011 |
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May 7, 2011 12:42
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seacat posted:But consider how many of these associate director of R&D, director of R&D, director of analysis, whatever openings are there in the country vs the number of grads pumped out every year? How many openings do you think early in the USA.. 500? 1000? I agree, it definitely is a gamble but you don't get anywhere without taking some risks. 5 years isn't that long in the grand scheme of things. Despite the hours, most of the PhD's I know look back pretty fondly on grad school. Maybe it's because they could land jobs. I haven't talked to that many people that couldn't get one, so I can see that being extremely frustrating. Probably the best way to go is to have a company pay for your PhD. Then you know management likes you, and you have a job once your done. At my company getting 60% of your salary plus tuition covered while working on your degree is a pretty sweet deal. Having no tuition costs or stipend costs to the university makes applications way easier as well (universities love the idea of having access to our departments resources if needed as well). Plus you have a guaranteed job for three years (although you can't quit either). The PhD glut is going to be even worse in 5 years, once everyone that went on to a higher degree because they couldn't land a job graduates. gninjagnome fucked around with this message at 13:20 on May 8, 2011 |
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May 8, 2011 13:18
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Whelp, I've taken a job in a business unit of our plant operations group. No more lab work for me!
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May 24, 2011 17:27
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I've heard that it was a bunch of other tech in the biologic area like gene mapping and such came along in the late 80's and into the 90's which created a lot new drug targets, and the advancement of computers at the time helped to develop ways to quickly ID drug candidates. Not sure if it's 100% true, but it does make sense. I've also occasionally heard that it was changes in the FDA that sorta resulted in a bulge of approvals, and that we're back to historical norms. This could also be a factor. I don't think it's a cut back on R&D spend, but I do think a lot of management was very misguided during that time. It was the first time that blockbuster drugs came into existence, and a lot people just saw $$. There was definitely a large amount of greed, and perception that we could keep making these blockbuster drugs forever. 10 years ago, my upper management's philosophy was that if the drug wasn't going to make $1 billion/year or more, it wasn't worth developing. That plan resulted in a huge hole in our pipeline a few years later, which we are just now recovering from by focusing on smaller markets that don't have good treatments (therefore faster approval and easier to capture market share without as much marketing cost) and in-licensing like crazy. I wouldn't be surprised if all the pharma consolidation over the last decade has overall reduced the number as well, as it hasn't been shown that larger companies are actually any better a drug discovery and there are just less companies out there now. Basically, I think it was a confluence of things that made it easy to develop drugs for a while, and management changed the business on the assumption that the gravy train would last forever. Once things changed, we're seeing the fallout now as companies panic and try to cut costs because there billion dollar blockbusters are all coming off patent, and they have nothing to replace it. Small companies probably won't start to take over the market though. It's just way to expensive for a small company to pay for clinical trials and go through the late stage clinical approvals, so, they inevitably have to partner with a bigger company. Once a small company develops a good portfolio or technology, and has a working relationship with a big company, they become an acquisition target and the money can be really hard to resist. I guess a small company could grow their business and become a big player, but their management would have to be really disciplined about growing the business and not decide to just cash out. gninjagnome fucked around with this message at 12:30 on May 28, 2011 |
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May 28, 2011 12:26
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Solkanar512 posted:How is that not an OSHA violation? You should make a discrete call asking for a surprise visit. At my company, they took them away so you have to go to medical and get it looked at, no matter how minor the injury. Get a paper-cut - trip to the medical. On the other hand, if it was anything major, we have an on-site ambulance that could get to you faster then it would take to find and remember where the first aid kit was.
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Jun 8, 2011 03:40
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seacat posted:The only person who tries to limit REAL dangerous behavior in the lab like heating explosive and flammable poo poo on the bench (not in the hood) without safety glasses is me and another chemist. How little some chemists regard safety still boggles my mind. We have a guy that still mouth pipets organic solvents on occasion.
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Jun 8, 2011 12:11
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seacat posted:Industry has postdocs? I thought that was a strictly academic rape thing. We usually have a couple post doc floating around at my company as well. They do the exact same work as a full time employee, so I think it's basically a fancy way of saying you're a contractor or a temp. It's typically a 2 year stint and I'd say about 50% of then end up with a job offer at the end.
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Jul 17, 2011 12:04
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We just had a position open up, so we've started hitting up the people we interviewed on campus last fall.
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Jul 26, 2011 22:40
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Looks like Merck will be laying off 13,000 employee's worldwide... awesome! On a funnier note - I just found out today that we just rehired a guy that we fired (straight up fired, not laid off) a few years ago as a technician. This guy was a PhD level senior scientist, and is now working a job that requires an associates degree - it's at least a 7 level demotion. I can't imagine how desperate you must to go back to the place that fired you, and take that much of a hit to your pride and salary.
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Aug 2, 2011 22:17
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It's really hard to predict how the job market will change over the time it takes to get a PhD. Also, if you really aren't passionate about your PhD subject, you're going to be miserable the whole time and once you graduate.
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Aug 18, 2011 02:02
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Kinetica posted:Only reason I bring this up, is while I know it doesn't look good for the med school, if I were to really pull it up this next year and in the years after, how bad would it hit me for a grad school? The main problem is that med schools get so many applicants that it's pretty easy to just throw out all applications that aren't 4.0, or really close. All the documentation that you were sick might be good if you can get it in front of an actual decision maker, but it will be pretty hard to make it past the screening. With grad school, you have a better chance because application numbers are lower, and if you make good connections with your professors in undergrad, you can probably get them to speak to professors at the universities you are applying to.
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Aug 18, 2011 22:00
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What area of manufacturing? I worked as a process engineer for API scale-up - mainly bringing processes into pilot plants and kilo labs, but I did rotate into the operations group for a few months, and I spent some time at our manufacturing sites. I can probably answer some general questions, and take a good stab at others, as I've worked with a lot of people that used to work in manufacturing groups.
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Sep 1, 2011 22:39
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Sundae posted:Also, no matter where you end up or who you work for, make damned certain you don't alienate your more experienced co-workers (or often your less experienced ones either). The science world is very, very small in any given field; your co-workers know far more people outside your company than you likely think they do, especially if it's a high-turnover lab. What's weirder is when people you've never met at other companies know who you are, and already have an opinion about how good you are.
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Oct 4, 2011 12:06
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Appachai posted:Those phd salaries are mostly after postdoc by the way Unless you have connections! A large number of the chemists in my department got their degrees while working under one of ~6 specific professors (not school, professors). We basically call them up when we have an open position and ask who they recommend from their group. Then we bring them in for an interview, and if they don't totally gently caress things up, we give them a job offer. Sometimes they are post docs, but mostly they are newly minted PhD's.
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Oct 16, 2011 13:41
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My company has rolled out Yammer! It's some sort of corporate twitter-like program that's supposed to help with collaboration. Except it's hosted on external servers, so we can't post anything important on there. I'm really not sure what it's point is exactly, but I am learning that people outside of R&D apparently do gently caress all with their day (and are really obsessed with their iphones). Someone took a photo of a fortune cookie and uploaded it!
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Oct 28, 2011 00:11
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Solkanar512 posted:Time to shut this fucker down if you ask me. Who would I go to outside of the local papers? A friend of mine has suggested the FDA for the mice issue, but what about allowing employees to become test subjects? Isn't this poo poo regulated? It's all regulated by the FDA, so I guess that's where you'd want to start with a report. Not 100% sure, but maybe call the Office of Compliance? http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/CentersOffices/CDER/ucm081992.htm
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Nov 2, 2011 22:14
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You could also try OSHA, they're the other agency I hear a lot about at work with regard to safety. I'd just try reporting them everywhere.
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Nov 3, 2011 02:46
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Vladimir Putin posted:We can't save you but your paycheck and career stability will. I heard that once you move out of the technical side, it's more stable and you get paid better. Having made the move myself, the pay isn't much better, but the hours are more regular, and it's much easier to move around to other positions that you find interesting. Being able to work 8-5, and not having to cover double shifts for two weeks straight is pretty awesome.
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Nov 9, 2011 23:43
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Sundae posted:Thanks for that. I didn't think the FDA gave a poo poo about that (otherwise how on earth would you change shifts in a continuous production environment?), but I wasn't sure. They must be trying to save money on gowns, which is bullshit. When I worked on a highly potent cancer med, I calculated that each time I went in and out of the area, I threw away about $30 worth of gear. I was in the lab on that project for 6 months, with three trips in and out a day for lunch and breaks, so at $90/day it came out to $11,000 for just me going in and out of the lab to do work. With a minimum of 2 people in the area, and usually 3, at a time, this meant it cost the company ~$25,000 for 6 months of development work just to pay for us going in and out of the facility - and this was in development.
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Nov 19, 2011 14:34
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It's amazing how much money will get thrown at a new acquisition. My company bought the rights to a project for a couple million, put a massive number of people to work on a new synthetic route, then looked at the clinical trial data and then paid a few million to give it back to the original company. Oh, and we stopped work on a similar drug because it overlapped drug targets. The whole thing was just bizarre.
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Jan 19, 2012 03:54
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Tommmmm posted:You Pharma/bio guys sound like you're working in a personal nightmare - sounds like I could never do that. I work for a very large engine manufacturer in the failure/investigation lab and my enjoyment swings at times. It's a good job, but at an absolute dead end in terms of advancement. Comparatively it's extremely laid back compared to what I've read here. It does really depend on the company. Mine is fine, aside from some typical worker angst, it's really not that bad. People lose perspective at my company because most of them were hired out of school, and therefore don't have a good idea what it's like to work for another company. The only real big problem is difficulty in advancing in a scientific track. There is no real clear pure science advancement opportunities, so you are stuck trying to be more mangery - and there are so many people trying to be project leads, and engineering leads, that it's kind of a grind. I personally jumped ship to the plant operations group in a business role rather then try and compete for a limited number of advancement opportunities, and have been pretty happy despite the lack of lab work (I do get to analyze large data sets, so it's not complete middle management).
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Jan 29, 2012 18:42
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stab stabby posted:I'm a research assistant in an industry lab. Sometimes, if it's only 4 but I have nothing else useful to do, I start looking for stuff to do just so I can look busy. The key is to find out if it really matters or not to your management. Many of the chemists and engineers in my old department would come in at 7-8 and stay till 6 or 7. I could never do that for any length of time, so I personally worked from 8-4, got my poo poo done on time, and never had any issues with my boss.
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Feb 4, 2012 03:06
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Solkanar512 posted:While this is what they'll say, can't anyone with a decent lawyer point out that even the most rudimentary QMS would have caught something as blatant as "adding too many sugar pills" or "reordering sugar pills"? If I'm not mistaken they're a different color (or could be made that way trivially) and could be quickly checked by an optical scanner, right? This of course would be in addition to standard lot sampling procedures. There is enough area for doubt, that while you might be able to win given enough time Pfizers play will be to drag things out in court so you will settle or just give up. I can see them bringing up things like proving you were taking the pills correctly to try make it impossible to prove culpability. I'm sure a class action law suit is already in the works, but then any one individual will probably not get a huge settlement out of it. And I think Pfizer may actually be able to argue that each case is too different to form a class in the first place - if Merck was able to do it for Vioxx, I don't see why Pfizer wouldn't try for this.
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Feb 4, 2012 17:37
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canvasbagfight posted:I don't have any specific examples for lack of asking, but I get the general impression from some of my recently ex-Genentech coworkers that the situation has been in decline since. Some of the more recent reviews on glassdoor agree too. I'd love to learn more about it though. I'm not sure it's necessarily all due to Roche. I think they always had bureaucratic tendencies, and it's been a long time coming (just the natural cycle from small to large company). My mom recently retired from there after 10 years, and she was always complaining about management and the paperwork towards the end (she did love the perks though) - I always wondered why their performance reviews were 15 pages long.
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Feb 11, 2012 13:21
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Worst thing at my site was a contractor who tried to open an electric panel with a screw driver and fried himself (he was not an electrician, and was not supposed to touch the panel...). What's weirder is knowing someone murdered their husband with chemicals they took from work.
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Mar 15, 2012 22:16
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So Pfizer's been in the news lately. I'm not sure how their plan of slashing R&D budget by 30% and selling off their profitable divisions so they can buy back stock is going to work out for them. At least when my company did something similar, we didn't touch R&D spend, and used the cash to in-license new compounds or acquire small companies with promising products in development.
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May 3, 2012 12:05
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john ashpool posted:With the way companies keep cutting discovery, is it safer to hang in process development instead? If you want long term stability, most of my co-workers think a few years in process R&D then a transfer into a sourcing group is the way to go. Process R&D can be outsourced, but someone will still have to manage assets being run at vendors, review proposals, coordinate different sites, etc. and having a chemistry background is very useful for that.
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May 7, 2012 23:32
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More text on the resume does not mean it will be better received. Resumes need to be concise so that the person looking at it can get a feel for you as quickly as possible. Many people will not even bother looking at a second page, or immediately dismiss it. After reviewing resumes for the last 6 years, I can say I've yet to see a BS or MS resume that couldn't be done in 1 page.
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May 9, 2012 22:59
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I could never work in manufacturing, for the exact reasons you've outlined. You end up so chained to the schedule, it's ridiculous. Running my processes in the pilot plant twice a year was as close as I want to get to actually having to work on the floor/shift work. Of course, taking a job on the business side of the pilot plant operations group might not have been the best idea if I want to avoid it in the long run.
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Jun 24, 2012 01:31
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Is there such a thing as a good pharmaceutical marketing story?
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Jul 3, 2012 11:29
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Article said that they previously set aside 3B for future fines. Presumably, they were in negotiations, and had a rough idea how much they would have to pay, so it's not that surprising. Note: negotiating a fine is a ridiculous idea, but I'm pretty sure all these settlements are like that.
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Jul 3, 2012 22:49
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Appachai posted:A BS chem drone at my company makes ~35K for the first year, then ~40K the next year. I think our lab techs make a little more (like in the 40-50K range) base salary, but they can get overtime which can bump up the base salary by another 10K pretty easily, considering how much we hand out. Minimum overtime is 4 hours, so if you're only asked to stay over for an hour, you still get paid for 4. If you manage to get a scientist position as a BS you're in the 50-60K range, but no overtime. I've never heard of a BS chemist being hired (seems is MS minimum), but we hire a decent number of chemical engineers.
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Oct 23, 2012 20:57
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Sites been closed for last 3 days, maybe more. Currently running on minimal power from our cogen plant. Maybe I can get the week off!
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Oct 31, 2012 21:39
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Look up STAR interviews. It's a pretty common behavioral interview model, and it's the one my company uses. I'm sure they will use that, or something very similar. Main thing remember is they are looking for examples where you demonstrated a particular behavior. It should be pretty easy figure out what they are looking for - it's going to be things like working in a team, working independently, driving a project to completion, etc. Try and think through a couple of good examples for your self that can be adapted to these types of questions. I personally prefer examples from work/intern/research experience instead of school project work. Mainly because being assigned to work with a slacker or something is really cliche, and hard to make compelling.
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Nov 26, 2012 00:48
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FTIR and Raman are are starting to be used more and more at my company for real time monitoring of reactions. I helped develop a model that would take FTIR data in real time from a reaction, and predict the expected time for the reaction to reach completion so we could immediately quench the reaction. Needed to do it, because we would get too many impurities if we let the reaction run for the hour it would take for the analytical lab to get us results by HPLC.
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Feb 1, 2013 00:58
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Have you looked at sourcing groups? They are the people that deal with vendors that make the starting materials we use for processing. It's not the straight financial side, but I know a couple people in our group, and a few of them went out for MBAs. They have to know (in our case) chemistry in order to be able work with project teams on creating RFPs, and need to review contracts and such with vendors. They also help manage the interface between the vendor and the project team if there are issues with the chemistry when they scale up. They tend to get more involved in the financial side of the R&D groups, as they are more directly dealing with budgets. I would imagine there's something similar for biologics that could make use of a life science background. Edit: There are also virtual companies, that buy assets from other companies, and then manage the scale-up and initial testing of compounds purely through contract vendors. They basically exist to try and get compounds through Phase II and into Phase III to try and essentially flip compounds to bigger pharmaceutical companies. I worked on a compound that we ended up selling to one of these companies, so I had to transfer some work to them. Talking to the guys at the company, it seemed like a cool job - requires a lot of travel. They required a combination of science and business in order to function, as they didn't own any internal R&D capability. Needed to be able to evaluate other companies, assets, etc. gninjagnome fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Feb 12, 2013 |
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Feb 12, 2013 00:09
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C-Euro posted:I feel like there's a more general thread for this sort of question, but since I'm interested in chemistry/science jobs I'll ask here: Is it worth it to apply for positions that you know you're not qualified for, or to give resumes to companies that don't list any positions you might be qualified for? I doubt it will be worth it to apply for positions that you don't qualify for through web sites - for the most part, it's just gonna be filtered out. If you can get your resume into a someone's hand, you probably stand a better shot if you can at least talk to someone about a potential fit despite the differences. On the other hand, if you have a contact that's willing to take your resume. You have a better chance. There's a chance that there are positions that may not have been public posted yet. My company usually post internally for a month or so before we post publicly, but we'll take referrals from employees during that time period.
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Feb 13, 2013 23:47
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