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I've wanted to make this thread for six years, but now I'm corporate and bound by a shitload of NDAs  My previous background was in a uHTS lab programming industrial robots to move microarray plates around to screen millions of small molecules for a variety of therapeutics. Virtual screening like that dengue screen is bullshit, hit rates are terrible  The lab I run now is a 10 year old HTS lab that I'm in charge of renovating, but our screens are much more focused on alternative energy research instead of drug discovery. Fortunately I'm in a pay-to-play field backed by a huge company so the budgets are nice. We currently use our in-house LIMS but one thing we're starting to realize is that system continuity is tough when all of the designers left five years ago. Supportable infrastructure is really really really important.
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Feb 25, 2011 07:37
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^^^^^^^ This is why I can't do raw milk. Sundae posted:Seriously, though... the number of things I'm not allowed to tell people that I really, really need to tell people is astonishing. How am I supposed to get pricing quotes for drug components from vendors if I'm not allowed to tell them what I want to order from them? That's right... we clamp down on formulations so hard that I can't even order excipients these days! (Meanwhile, every one of the damned things will be listed on our label on release anyway. Any moron with a bottle of our drug, a USP subscription, and the ability to run some mass spec can tell EXACTLY what's in our poo poo anyway.) Yeowch, this is why I got out of pharma. Fortunately we are really good at collaborating so we don't have any internal issues, but since my boss is our compliance and ethics leader I have to play ball. It's odd going from academia to industry, you feel so much less agile as a lab manager when every piece of paperwork has to pass through three sites and six people. Oh well, at least I have a huge budget now.
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Feb 27, 2011 06:38
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Solkanar512 posted:I want to shoot these people. No one gives a gently caress about anyone else's work and heaven forbid you pull someone's equipment for the required periodic calibration. When I was in academia we had this completely insane post-doc that was convinced that we were all conspiring to contaminate her FBS.
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Mar 8, 2011 05:34
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My coworker started putting brochures for anti-schizophrenia medication in her cube on nights and weekends until she finally snapped (about two months after I left), called our PI a "Poison man", and got fired. And I feel you on the old equipment Solkanar- I'm replacing an automated incubator with the asset tag #0001. When it was installed I was eleven years old.
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Mar 10, 2011 03:50
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Solkanar512 posted:Has anyone here ever dealt with USDA auditors, or the USDA in general? I drink beer with a guy who was king poo poo at the USDA a few years back, PM me if you like.
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Mar 26, 2011 07:35
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Solkanar512 posted:Thanks for your help, I sent you a PM! I'll bring it to his attention. I'd love to see that LIMS as a final product, our custom LIMS is a little long in the tooth and I think we're going to go OTS for the next system.
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Mar 28, 2011 18:24
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Lyon posted:From what I've seen custom in-house LIMS are great, until the developers leave and you need major changes. That's the primary advantage of purchasing a system from one of the major/established players. My company has also managed to stay pretty industry friendly, we have a pharma system that we'll have IQ, OQ, and PQ done in 90 days, same thing for QM labs and Bio Banking labs. Hey, I've heard of that. Our custom LIMS is nearly 11 years old, and one person knows it inside and out. We've been burned before pretty badly with unsupportable custom work, so OTS is my new practice going forward. So my lab will still run when I fly the coop for a 50% raise in a few years.
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Mar 29, 2011 07:12
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Solkanar512 posted:I wish recruiters would understand the same thing. I'm getting tired of them saying, "you have a mathematical biology degree, you aren't qualified for lab work". So loving stupid. Recruiters don't know what the gently caress when it comes to specialty positions. I keep getting offers asking for unrelated Ph.Ds for field repair engineer positions at fairly stupid salaries. I keep getting pressure to go for a doctorate but the opportunity cost is huge (at least 50k/year less), and every staff scientist I work with says it's a poo poo idea. Am I wrong for agreeing with them? All our C-level execs and directors are Ph.D holders, which would be a great thing to shoot for ten years from now.
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May 5, 2011 06:57
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I think I made the correct choice, I've been directing groups of post-docs since I was 23. I'd be amazed if my work would sponsor anything but an MBA at this point- but it's something to bring up at my career panel next quarter. Oh god maintenance stickers- our COO came through for a safety audit and noticed the company we get our PMs from left stickers on all the machines saying they need to be serviced again in a year. A 115V plug does not need to be PMed once a year
Bastard Tetris fucked around with this message at 09:24 on May 5, 2011 |
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May 5, 2011 09:21
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My company went through a complicated split and acquisition and not a single person got laid off. I think I'm happier in industry, people are more willing to listen to colleagues without Ph.Ds and I like making more than 20$/hr.
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May 7, 2011 08:58
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Hah, I ran into my company's old CEO at a party tonight- guy went back to get a Ph.D half time between two institutes in oceanography just because he could  Apparently the company's planning some collaboration with the UC system so this might work itself out. Which is sweet because there's no way I'm making it past senior manager without a doctorate unless I go the business route. I met our chief scientist last week which was pretty inspiring- she's got 30+ years of experience as a physicist and in under a year knows almost every technical aspect of our business and the greater context it falls into, I wish I could aim that high. Science parties are the best. Bastard Tetris fucked around with this message at 11:07 on May 8, 2011 |
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May 8, 2011 10:34
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Vladimir Putin posted:Adjuncting is perfect part time work if you are taking time off to have a kid or if you are in between jobs. But as a career, no it sucks. Its highly flexible and portable. Also postdocs earning 32k are doing it temporarily. Eventually almost all postdocs move on to vastly higher paying jobs in science or out of science. That can be true, but spending your early-mid 30s making twice minimum wage with a Ph.D is soul-crushing, especially when you don't know how long it's going to last.
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May 10, 2011 08:58
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Does anyone work in a crime lab? (Criminalist, etc.)
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May 13, 2011 04:02
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We use a ton of academic journals in our work. poo poo, we even partnered with UCs to push our work forward. I have a feeling I'm slowly turning into a suit instead of a lab coat, help Any biotech/MBAs in here?PS: loving lol at outsourcing drug discovery- enjoy watching your leads meet a fiery death in phase III after sinking 300 million dollars into them because the lab you outsourced everything to just made up results Bastard Tetris fucked around with this message at 11:07 on May 21, 2011 |
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May 21, 2011 11:01
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A friend of mine just travels the west coast showing labs how to use their microplate readers and he says it's the best job he's ever had
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May 27, 2011 08:59
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Eunabomber posted:How does anyone in a PhD program have time for an internship? That's another thing- your IP is hosed if you outsource to a BRIC country. One of our old C-level execs took off to China and uses our screening technology with a shitload of workers spending days manually pipetting and selecting things my automated platforms do in an hour. But hey, they don't have OSHA in China!
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May 28, 2011 05:34
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seacat posted:That is one thing I will say about my job which is laughable in some ways. We DO hire every one of our temps that isn't a total fuckup, and they DO get good (not fantastic, but good) health insurance, 401(k) with company match, etc etc and are not strung along as temps for months to years. I get kinda mad when we bring new folks on as temps, because our benefits are pretty insane so they just shot themselves in the foot for the first 6 months of their employment. Temp agencies are nice when you're straight out of college and don't want to spend 6 months at the parents' house looking for a job, but goddamn it is a poo poo deal for the entry-level folk. And if HR thinks they can get me a candidate for my department at a temp agency I will slay them.
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Jun 1, 2011 07:33
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Every day something makes me sad at work I refer to this thread.
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Jun 8, 2011 07:13
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I spent christmas day 2007 ducking out from a family gathering to passage some fuckhead princess stem cells we called princess cells because if you didn't treat them like princesses they'd fail and die. They died. The next group of cells were isolated from fetal mouse heart valves so each culture represented some absurd amount of work hours and a total mountain of dead unborn mice. gently caress cell culture. My next experiment involves a shitton of highly volatile, potentially explosive, carcinogenic, skin-absorbing and hepatotoxic organic solvents. Who wants to take an over/under on how many brand new instruments I contaminate or damage this quarter? Bastard Tetris fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Jun 9, 2011 |
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Jun 9, 2011 07:22
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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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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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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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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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Solkanar512 posted:Ok, how long do the labs you guys work for take to hire people? We hire within a few weeks of the posting, but apparently we subject our prospective employees to a kobayashi maru of some horrifying 6 hour personality profiling which probably turns away our best candidates. Apparently there are questions like "Would you rather shoot your mother, child, or yourself in the foot?" and you will get pushback on each response. I am pretty convinced that if all the acquired employees had to take that route the number of employees that would remain would be in the single digits out of about 300. Corporate HR is loving insane. Not because of failing the personality tests, but scientists rarely jive well with rigid metrics based on "soft" responses, especially when said results seem so judgemental. Guess who's going to management training next month! Edit: Also I'm asking my head of R&D to give me a completely absurd capital budget on my birthday, hooray! Apparently it is somewhere around 60-75% of the entire quarter's expenditures. My field is not cheap I inspire incredibly smart researchers and give them top of the line equipment and support to help them get the job done but holy crap our overhead feels like the most unorganized thing ever. Bastard Tetris fucked around with this message at 09:28 on Jul 28, 2011 |
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Jul 28, 2011 09:20
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Lyon posted:Want a new LIMS? I'll take that increased budget off your hands! Nope, that's informatics' call. But I got approved, hooray! It may be Pfizer, but La Jolla is a pretty legit place to work, smaller places like Tanabe or a CRO that seems to be all over the place which might be a great thing to investigate while you're at PFE.
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Aug 5, 2011 06:35
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I just talked to a guy that does X-ray crystallography with a robot holding the crystal, holy poo poo.
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Aug 13, 2011 09:09
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Appachai posted:This is how almost all crystallography is done now btw. Remote access to control the robot over the Internet. It's nice to be able to collect data at 3am in your own place. As it should be, I just had no idea it extended to crystallography. Grats on bouncing out of that crappy position, Solkanar.
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Aug 16, 2011 03:08
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Hah, well a 360 controller is way more ergonomically nice than a Fanuc or Staubli pendant- you could knock a man out with those. Have you seen any of the automated crystallography platforms from Zinsser analytic? they seemed pretty nice.
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Aug 16, 2011 07:24
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On the job math training sounds about right- we're doing a thing where about 10% of the R&D staff are being trained in Statistica this year, it sounds like it'll be really helpful.
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Aug 19, 2011 05:04
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Well I just spent three hours of my workday showing off my lab for a recruitment video. Sandiegoons please to send me your CVs if you are a technical badass with a bachelor's or a post-doc+3 yrs. Really thick skin for corporate bullshit mandatory. Fortunately I will handle most of it as your lab manager. Bastard Tetris fucked around with this message at 09:45 on Aug 27, 2011 |
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Aug 27, 2011 09:07
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Epitope posted:If you don't mind sharing, what sort of post doc experience do you like to see? Do you prefer postdocs from industry or academia, do you want them to know the techniques already? Both are pretty welcome (we're partnered with UC Berkeley and UIUC), knowing the techniques beforehand will be nice but I'm not sure that it's mandatory, but with the amount of people we're interviewing I think it might as well be. Atomic Force Microscopy will be a big plus for analytical. I think we're also looking at metabolomics, synthetic biologist post-docs, and molecular bio folks. We're also looking for scale-up and process engineers. And I wish we could be looking for some folks in my lab, but noooooo HR wants to keep headcount down :/ Edit: That PI from the last page is a loving rear end in a top hat, I hope his patients saved by his miracle cures realize what a cocksucker he is
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Sep 2, 2011 08:25
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Oh god, that has to give your shipping and receiving folks fits. I have to ship some of our robots to Canada for repairs and it's always some crazy customs nightmare. Do most of you guys use a central stockroom for your consumables? I'm trying to set up a supply chain for our users for liquid handler tips and it's getting to be quite a pain- we can't set up accurate forecasting so we can't set up standing orders, but ordering piecemeal is problematic to say the least, and I frequently have to overnight tip cases. Stalling a project for a day because the tips are on a boat would probably get me lynched. Epitope posted:Good to know, thanks. I'm talking about a high-throughput screening project with a potential postdoc advisor. It is fun to talk about but I expect the work itself may be tedious- running robots and/or being a robot. Rule #1 is to not be afraid of the robots, unless you are actually running them, then rule #1 (as the laboratory automation safety manager) is be really afraid of industrial robots. Does the site have dedicated HTS staff to help you develop the assay and methods and help you run it? Most of the screens I headed up in academia involved working directly with a postdoc or PI to set up a screen, develop the assay and set conditions/goals/staffing/whatever, and I would either train their staff or I would assist their staff in running the screen. Are the screens fully or partially automated? Industry-wise it was a lot more streamlined, I usually just work directly with directors and resource managers and our RAs are really comfortable working with HTS platforms. The work might be tedious, but a robot's doing it, so who cares
Bastard Tetris fucked around with this message at 09:09 on Oct 9, 2011 |
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Oct 9, 2011 08:54
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I know in the past I've given you advice in confidence but after hearing the mice on PCP story I'm voting "all of the above"
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Nov 4, 2011 03:36
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I am so motherfucking glad I didn't take that job at Illumina. I keep seeing FSE postings to be the king poo poo for a couple instruments I have 6+ years of experience on (let me just call them Shmanus, Smiocel, and Schmiomek FXps), but I keep feeling like I'm getting bored applications and service development. On the other hand it starts to become a hard sell to ask for a Sr. Staff Scientist position without a Ph.D. Does anyone want to tell me how much project leadership and resource management sucks? Edit: Also gently caress service contracts, anything I can't fix we just call service to handle and I think we've been running at about 15-25% of what the service contracts would cost yearly. Bastard Tetris fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Feb 22, 2012 |
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Feb 22, 2012 09:09
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Sounds like a decent gig then, as for risks- our entire business unit (4000+ employees) is a risk and it looks like we're going for it. I've got the budget and the support, and it doesn't seem like there's too much of a political mess. Also my new workstation arrived today from Switzerland in a 2600 pound crate and now I feel like a kid that can't open his Christmas present until the installation engineers show up.
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Feb 29, 2012 10:33
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It's a really odd feeling knowing that 17 people at your company died on the job last year. As much as it can be lovely to have really rigorous safety regulations, I also like not being killed on the job. Bastard Tetris fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Mar 15, 2012 |
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Mar 15, 2012 05:13
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My site does the bioscience R&D for a much larger company (80k employees), four deaths were from a plane crash, thirteen deaths were from a plant explosion. I do get to read some of the safety digest reports though, I think my favorite was when a contractor in Brazil reached in his toolbox and grabbed a snake instead of a tool. Worst thing at our site was a slip and fall.
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Mar 15, 2012 08:27
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I think the takeaway lesson here is "stay the gently caress away from big pharma if you want any semblance of job security".
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Mar 17, 2012 06:46
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I didn't get to go to Pittcon
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Mar 29, 2013 06:21
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Do process safety reviews feel like being the new sorority pledge getting all her fat parts circled in sharpie, or is it just me?
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Apr 13, 2013 08:04
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