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Ooh, yay! I was waiting for this thread.  I'm down in the dark and scary basement laboratories of pharmaceutical drug development. My work is a cross between chemistry, engineering, and material science. Basically, someone upstream hands me an active drug ingredient, and they say "figure out what the gently caress to do with this thing". Sometimes they'll be a bit more precise and say "This is (Drug Name). It's an IR tablet normally. Make it a transdermal patch for us instead so we can squeeze even more money out of it!!" I spend a lot of my time yelling at our marketing department, telling project managers that they're insane, and exchanging punches with our business units (the douchebags who control our research budgets and have slashed them by 60% in the last year). I spend most of my time making new versions of drugs that already exist, but every now and then I get an awesome little bonus like a cancer medication that actually does its job (cryzotinib recently - that was fun!) or my own little side research that I can publish. But mostly boner meds that already exist. EDIT: I am willing to answer any questions about working in scientific positions in big pharma that you'd like. For a quick TL;DR, though... big pharma isn't stable, so don't work here. Sundae fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Feb 25, 2011 |
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Feb 25, 2011 04:58
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Bastard Tetris posted:I've wanted to make this thread for six years, but now I'm corporate and bound by a shitload of NDAs gently caress NDAs and the stupid 'internal confidentiality' poo poo. Why the flying gently caress is the floorplan for my lab building labeled "Confidential, internal use only" ? Oh, that's right... because the building was designed by half-crazed orangutans, and the company wants to hide that. (PYF TPS thread reference, sorry.) 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.)
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Feb 27, 2011 01:36
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Solkanar512 posted:Why is that a problem when you've been asked to buy illegal generics because they're cheaper anyway? :p That was great. You know what, though? They canned the project anyway, claiming it was too expensive. I have literally zero internal development projects right now. Everything is a sourcing project trying to buy up small biotechs in India to steal their ultra-cheap pipelines. Yeah... the applications have been flying over here. Not quite what I signed up for. I signed up for things like crizotinib (my previous spelling was incorrect) and for my first rheumatoid arthritis drug (which failed miserably). I didn't sign up for projects so lame that even BonerMed 2.0 is more exciting / useful.
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Feb 27, 2011 17:19
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Engineer Lenk posted:Yeah, a lot of drugs fail. Something like 22 NMEs were approved last year. The funny thing is just how many of ours don't "fail", but are canned for insufficient revenue predictions. "Insufficient" lately has meant "won't deliver buckets of gold to our doorsteps". I would say that easily 90% of the viable drugs that come through my department get killed for insufficient revenue now. That's not even counting all the miserable failures. 
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Mar 1, 2011 03:47
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Anyone stuck on projects with that one spineless guy who doesn't know how to say no? You know... the guy who works 90 hours a week and then comes in on weekends too, then complains that he didn't finish everything and his boss will have his rear end for it? (I'm not even talking "come in for 45 minutes to feed your cell cultures", but "come in for 12 hours Saturday and another 10 on Sunday".) I want to kill him, because he's making it very hard for me to keep my hours normalized. I have a very clear rule with my project leads and my supervisor: 40 hours, period. Not an hour more. If I have to work late or come in early, it's going to come off of other days. My only exception is for literally unyielding urgent deadlines. Paperwork for an FDA query with a due-date next week? Fine, I'll work late. People from our France sites coming over for a QbD meeting, need work done before they fly out on Friday? Okay, fair enough. Project timeline accelerated because the guys in suits said so? Tough poo poo. They get 40 hours and not a minute more. I'm sticking firm to my 'tough poo poo' view, because I already know how this plays out. I'd finish the work, not even get credit for it, not get any benefit for it on my performance review at the end of the year, and I'm salaried without overtime so no extra pay. My spineless co-worker, however, immediately rolls over and tries to get the work done without me. I've literally forced him to go home before after finding out he'd worked for 24 hours straight without sleep. I gave him an off-the-record safety violation and sent him home. Is this seriously how it's going to play out? Every time I refuse to stay late, this schmuck is going to take it up the rear end from the company? For gently caress's sake dude... it's not worth your health. You don't even get overtime! Sundae fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Mar 3, 2011 |
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Mar 3, 2011 00:49
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My company, at least, heavily uses it. I'd be game for networking. I can't comment on the biostatistics stuff, but I know that there are regulatory courses and certifications that are available for FDA stuff. I'm supposed to be taking one this year if we have the budget for it (gently caress paying for it myself). I'll link the courses when I find them. quote:I'm guessing this guy has an H1-B visa, right? That's what they act like here. No, he's a standard employee! I understand H1-B visa holders acting like that; they're basically indentured servitude and risk deportation if they get fired. He's just a regular FTE.
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Mar 3, 2011 03:00
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Miss-Bomarc posted:It could be that he's just so astounded by the awesomeness of SCIENCE that he doesn't see spending twenty-four hours working as a bad thing, because OMG SCIENCE. He looks at an all-nighter in the lab the way you might, e.g., look at an all-nighter playing 'Starcraft'. Yeah, I'm with Solkanar on this one. Do you even work in science at all?  To be serious, though - I work for big pharma. I don't get to do real science. I just make boner pills over and over again. The closest I get to science is when people hand me completely impossible development tasks and say "make it work". Those can be fun engineering projects! For example, I had a two-drug combination where one was an acid, the other a base, and neither API worked if it left its specific pH range or formed salts. Meanwhile, one of them liked to hydrolize and release a second volatile acid, meaning contact-separation wasn't enough to get the drugs to work together. That was actually fun, unlike the stuff I'm babysitting in a disso bath right this second. gently caress this drug. (The fun drug project got canceled about two weeks after I finished working out how to get the dose to work, citing insufficient revenue predictions. Of course.)
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Mar 3, 2011 15:31
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I think we were both just laughing at the idea of OMG Science, rather than making fun of you.  In fairness, I thought everything was all spiffy when I started here too. Couldn't imagine why all my co-workers were such grumpy turds. It took less than three years for that to change. PFE's fast!I don't think this guy is one of those. He's been here 4 years, and he's a good ten to twenty years older than I am on top of that, so pretty sure he's been at other companies. He's just spineless. Anyone else have "no references for former employees allowed under penalty of termination" policies at work? Anyone else absolutely ignore them and provide references / calls for anyone who asks?
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Mar 4, 2011 18:06
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polyfractal posted:Regarding Masters vs PhD, I was always told that a Masters is worthless if you are interested in acadamia - you absolutely must have a PhD. I imagine this is different for industry though. I can't vouch for Australian industry, but biotech is imploding in the states right now. You can get jobs, but it's NOTHING like it was even ten years ago. That's not a good sign, because think of how little the field had going for it even ten years ago as far as technology goes. We've come a long way in the last decade, and there are even less entry-level positions than back then. The one thing I will say is this: A masters degree is not worthless in industry, but you will still hit a ceiling pretty quickly unless your company is a significant outlier. You still need a PhD to be anything more than a glorified lab-monkey. I had a lab manager offer with a masters degree at Cornell (both the degree being from them and the job offer from them, to clarify) which would have been quite interesting, but the pay was atrocious. The major benefit of positions like those are that you can often combine them with your own PhD program and effectively have an ultra-kickass stipend instead of living paycheck to paycheck throughout your entire grad career. (My stipend would have been $40K after the job salary adjustment to do my PhD. However, I declined this due to #1 - a vastly higher industry offer, and #2 - lack of a topic I loved enough to warrant doing my PhD.) Sundae fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Mar 5, 2011 |
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Mar 5, 2011 21:54
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polyfractal posted:Wow, I had no idea. Why do you think that is? Is it just because most things biology take longer to develop than other fields? Drowning because of its own hype about saving the world/cancer/immortality/whatever and then not delivering? Just too expensive? It's a combination of several things, in my opinion. I'm going to agree heavily with Solkanar512 on the research budgets. My company's research budget has been slashed every single year (this year, the difference was used to initiate a stock buyback) since I started here. Even more than sheer percentage cuts, the reallocations are deadly to research efforts. If you look at my company's research budget, you see about a 30% cut this year (which is several billion dollars, just for scale's sake). What you don't see is that the remaining budget has had 60% dedicated to external research acquisitions and only 40% to internal research. In short, we buy up other companies with our research budget now instead of developing drugs. In the business's view, this is a nice return on investment because they can pick up drugs other companies have already developed, or potentially entire pipe-lines by buying struggling biotechs for less than they're worth. From the biologist's point of view, he's finding himself out of a job because they don't need biologists to do acquisitions. We've shed so many scientists in the last 4 years, and we're just getting started again with more.  There are definitely some companies that buck the trend on this, but almost all of big pharma and a good portion of the little players have the same problems right now. Beyond that, the really little players are getting hamstrung because they can't afford to do the drug development themselves. Like you said, it's expensive and has a long product turnaround time. You can only rely on venture capital for so long, and in the current economy there isn't much of it going around. The other alternative used to be (and still is, if you have a real blockbuster) to go joint-venture with a big pharma, but they're all imploding on their own right now. At best, they'll offer you far less than you're worth. At worst, they'll say no because of an insufficient market estimate or potentially steal your IP anyway. On the public side, my friends inform ne research grants are evaporating too. I can't personally vouch for it, but I know that a lot of them didn't have their term contracts renewed because their positions were grant-funded and the grants ceased to exist. Edit: Or, you could read the post that he linked to. Oops.
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Mar 6, 2011 02:17
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It's a shame, because there are some really, really good companies to work for in the field. My friends who got laid off from Pfizer all ended up over at Cubist, and they love it there. They're a mid-size "small" company, so they might possibly have a little sticking power, but most of the little companies are in difficult financial straits even without the big players imploding. The big players absolutely had it coming. Agreed.
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Mar 6, 2011 03:47
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oldyogurt posted:Given the way things are trending, where is the pharma industry in the states going to be in 30 years? I don't know if any of us can answer that. I know I certainly can't. My guess is "China and India" is where it will be. Snide remarks aside, I don't think we can predict where a science/tech field is going to be in 30 years. Too much can change, and implosion is always a strong option.
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Mar 6, 2011 05:10
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quote:All you hear are academics griping about wanting to leave for the "greener side" of biology in industry. I'm going to check and see if one of my biologist friends in big pharma would like to give some input to this thread. If so, we'll get her set up with an account and perhaps she can give more details relevant to biology in particular. I was a bioengineering major / M.Eng in college and then stayed for a little bit working afterward for the school, but I was really quick to jump to industry when I got the chance. I didn't jump into biology here, though. I work in end-product development, effectively in material science and engineering. From my view, industry is still preferable to academia at least for a low-level employee/academic. I only have a masters degree. No matter what I do, I'll always be an underling whether I'm in industry or academia. My view of things was that the 'research freedom' of academia was largely overstated. I worked on the projects my lab had grants for, and since I wasn't a PhD student or one of the post-docs, I worked on projects they designated in particular. Effectively it was no different from what I do in industry. I work for PhD-holding upper-tier scientists on the projects they've been assigned by the department heads. The success of that project likely determines the continued funding of the department. The big differences are that I have more free time outside of work, I get better pay, and my benefits are better. On the other hand, I'm the youngest person in the department by about ten years (used to be five, but the 5-year guy quit recently) and have zero social connections with co-workers due to the age and stage-of-life differences. Instead of being too busy to spend time with people, I just have no desire to spend time with them. Golf before hitting up the elementary school choir event doesn't sound like my cup of tea. One comment I can make on biologists in industry is that if you work with cell cultures, you're still going to be here on nights and weekends. No way around it, I'm afraid. Oh... and people are still going to forget to close incubators, accidentally turn them off, or spill random crap in your cultures and not even leave you a note to apologize. Some things never change. (My friend was absolutely furious a few years ago before she got laid off because someone had tried to clean out a petri dish with bleach inside the loving incubator rather than remove it, and they spilled bleach onto all her cultures on the next shelf down.)
Sundae fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Mar 6, 2011 |
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Mar 6, 2011 15:33
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Willheim Wordsworth posted:How did you make that happen? I had to use a variety of really stupid controls. The drugs were formulated using low-hygroscopicity excipients and various buffering excipients (to keep the proper local pH) and then tableted separately. One was given a cheap film-coat that basically acted as a contact-blocker, while the other was given a better coating for the purposes of further limiting moisture uptake. We weren't allowed to co-package, so I ended up going with a dual-fill into a capsule (two tabs in a capsule). I used HPMC-based capsules (gelatin-acid crosslinking was a potential problem with gelatin capsules, plus gelatin has less water-blocking ability) plus a dual-purpose dessicant with silica gel and activated carbon. The silica does the usual "dry poo poo out" stuff, and the activated carbon pulls a decent amount of the volatile acid. The capsules were then put with the dessicant in a bottle. Basically, six billion little engineering fixes which sound like complete overkill but still only barely get us to our desired shelf-life. I'd like to revisit it as a co-package if I can get approval and then just toss two tabs into a dessicated foil-foil arrangement and see how that goes. Haven't been able to get approval to do that yet.
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Mar 7, 2011 14:53
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Wow. gently caress that guy. (Also, "internal pressure" ? What the gently caress?)
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Mar 8, 2011 15:44
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But... but... they NEED to take that uncalibrated equipment because by gosh their work is important and they can't wait 10 minutes to find someone to give them a proper unit or to go down the hall to find a calibrated unit! (Our lab is very out of date on calibration, sadly. The variation between balances is incredible. "Well, the tablets I made were 100mg +/- 15mg depending on where you weighed them. Does that work?")
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Mar 10, 2011 00:20
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seacat posted:Maybe they're more hardcore on pharma labs, though. I think the FDA is pretty hit or miss depending on who you have to deal with. I've never had anyone from them bug me about anything, but one of the people helping me on the analytical end of a project had to go down to DC to explain HPMC anomalies in person on two days' notice last week. Queries with only two days to reply in person? What the hell is that? As a tangent, does anyone here have to deal with the DEA on a regular or semi-regular basis? gently caress them so hard, and gently caress C-II designations even harder. I spend easily 5X my research time documenting API quantities and filling out forms. Also, I'm in R&D. How the gently caress am I supposed to know, at the beginning of the year, exactly how much of a controlled substance I'm going to need for the entire year? I end up having to request stupidly large amounts just to play it safe for in case something goes wrong, and good luck explaining that to them. Paraphrased... "Your request is for 200 grams. This exceeds our expected use estimate for your site based on previous quotas issued. Why are you asking for so much?" "Because I don't know how much I need due to the nature of this project, which didn't exist prior to this year. That's why I haven't asked for as much before. As for the amount, I'll keep needing more of it until I get it to work right." "We can't grant you a license without a full work plan and your end-point." "My end-point is undefined because it's based on stability. How do you want me to define an end-point for an undefined path which depends entirely on stability results?" "That's your problem, not ours." Heaven forbid you work on the project at two sites, too! Or if you do, good luck ever getting any of your drugs from one site to the other. I filed to get some stability samples from one of our UK labs sent over to my lab in the USA back in October. It's still not approved as of Friday. Sundae fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Mar 14, 2011 |
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Mar 14, 2011 00:10
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Nope, sorry.
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Mar 25, 2011 00:05
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We use a Citrix ELN system now instead of handwritten lab notebooks. ...except that there's no networking in our labs, so instead everything gets handwritten and then transcribed to ELN once I get back to my office. ...and the first half of my current projects are all in handwritten notebooks due to the surprise implementation of ELN. Those notebooks were confiscated to make sure we all switched over to the new system. I'm missing half of my data now as a result. 
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Mar 28, 2011 18:31
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quote:Your posts are my favorite in this thread. Your company sounds so awesomely inefficient based on your posts, it makes me chuckle every time. Inefficient doesn't even begin to describe it. I'm at PFE.
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Mar 28, 2011 20:02
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Lyon posted:Hah. I have yet to touch PFE because I'm brand new, not very technical, and a small time player in our company. I'm sure you've at least seen some people from my company as you're our largest customer. Do you actively use our system or know anyone from my company? I'm not using any names because that way I can just edit out that link later if I want. I've definitely seen stuff from your company floating around in the analytical labs, and I've seen your name pop up in our purchasing system before. My department doesn't really use a lot of the standard equipment / supplies, though, so we tend to have rather odd suppliers. (I'm in late-stage development, so I'm typically involved with sourcing from Mallinckrodt, J&M, Colorcon, or equipment manufacturers these days, especially since we have an internal supply chain to handle most of the ordering process.) Typically any procurement stuff I have to do is abnormal stuff where our regular networks can't handle it. (Custom orders, etc.) I have to give this place credit: PFE has some really phenomenal scientists and engineers. Some of these people are absolutely astounding. And yet, they're hamstrung beyond belief by the corporate offices / local management. It's incredible.
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Mar 28, 2011 20:34
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Ahhh, gotcha. Sorry, I was interpreting you as one of the equipment suppliers like VWR, etc. In that case, I probably am confusing your company with someone else because there's no reason I would have seen software packages in our procurement system.
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Mar 28, 2011 20:51
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Whoa, proper documentation and prep, and after it you weren't written up for anything? You are the first. Ever. In history. Some of the DEA's rules are impossible for me to follow. I don't have the project resources or the facilities to actually obey them.
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Apr 7, 2011 15:29
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Killed a Girl in 96 posted:So I'm graduating with a BSc in Biochemistry in a month, and I'm on the hunt for jobs here in Canada. For the past 4 years I've maintained a GPA around 3.8/3.9, have 1 published paper on nanopore technology, another that we're trying to get published (though it got turned down once Are you okay with medium pharma, or do you want the specific "big pharma" pharma? If you're dead set on "big pharma" pharma, you're in for some problems. They're all basically imploding right now under the weight of the collective poo poo that has accumulated at the top of their management structures. Boner pills only go so far, and most of them forgot that you need to actually make drugs to sustain your company. Stay the hell away from Merck and Pfizer right now, and probably Vertex as well. J&J is too fragmented for me to comment on, given they're basically a conglomerate of a bazillion smaller companies. Some are stable, some aren't. Roche is bad with the exception of Genentech. I'm told that even after being bought out, Genentech is still basically bio-Mecca. Novartis is hit or miss, but more stable than most. Lily is hiring as well. Based on some people I talked to at a conference last year, stay away from Teva for a bit. No idea on BMS, and stay away from Amgen like it has the plague. Despite so much of big pharma being in the United States, I'd actually suggest checking elsewhere first. The USA has a boatload of social and political problems right now, and on top of that, big pharma's implosion over here has swamped the market with experienced scientists who are out of work. For example, my company's fired about 40,000 scientists so far, and another 30,000 or so to go in the coming two years. Most of the other big companies are doing similar things, though probably not at quite the scale of my place. We're hosed in a very special sort of way. Great resume / grades coming out of school or not, you can't compete with someone who has been in the field for 15 years. If you're open to medium pharma, Cubist in Massachusetts, USA is a very nice company to work for. A lot of former PFE employees all ended up there, and I hear wonderful things about the place from them. They love it. Sundae fucked around with this message at 04:10 on Apr 8, 2011 |
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Apr 8, 2011 04:08
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Killed a Girl in 96 posted:Wow, you probably saved me 3 months worth of research into the field. Thanks a bunch for the info. Honestly, you do have *one* area where you can compete, and that is that you are way, way cheaper than experienced scientists. For comparison's sake: I started with a master of engineering degree for between $65K and $70K. This is a fantastic salary for someone starting out, in my opinion. I know many experienced scientists in the $90-150K range, and some of the highly-ranked ones who came in with PhDs and then worked many years can be in the $120-200K range, though very few get to the $200K range unless they're both godly and lucky. Those people will, of course, get snapped up in a heartbeat (if they get let go at all), but all the $120-150K people are just long-time scientists who are expensive and probably not particularly special compared to the newer, less-expensive, and more recently educated young guys. Get apps in before the next huge round coming this year (there are several companies which are going to slaughter their workforces later this year) and you might be able to get in. Of course, you also can't possibly compete with India, but that's another issue entirely. I'd like to offer a few more suggestions for prospective big- / middle-pharma job-searchers. #1: Cafe Pharma and BioFind http://www.cafepharma.com/boards/forumdisplay.php?f=4 http://biofind.com/rumor ^^^ Repeat after me: You are NOT going to these sites for news or to really read the posts. You are NOT going to these for news or to really read the posts. You are going to them to see how many people are bitching about companies, and to count the rumors / see the people whining. Cafe Pharma tends to be where sales / biz-side people congregate to whine (they're mostly losers, but even losers can give you ideas on how bad a company is), while Biofind draws a mix of sales and scientists. The scientist boards at CafePharma are pretty much empty. Count the rumors for your company. Don't bother reading them, but see how many people are worried about their jobs. No one rumor is likely to be right, but if there's 50 of them, something's hosed up. #2: Check the dates on those job postings and how oddly specific they are. A lot of the companies aren't actually hiring right now except for absolutely vital or temporary positions. We also tend to dump piles of job openings onto sites (including our own career websites) and never, ever clean them up even if the positions don't exist anymore. Don't apply for anything older than 6 months unless it's a broad-brush thing like "Multiple Entry Level positions", or things of that sort. Don't apply for anything ultra, ultra specific unless you know you can hit almost every single thing they ask for in a way that is easily searched by an HR dipshit who has no idea what you do. #3: If you do something that is an awful lot like something that is being asked for in a job listing, but it isn't called exactly the same thing, I am personally of the opinion that you should call it what the listing calls it. To pick a really lovely example, if a listing asks for 3+ years of experience with UPLC and you have 5 years of HPLC experience, call it UPLC anyway. The HR rep who checks your resume has no idea what either of them are, and will just see that you didn't list UPLC experience. Get to the technical interviews and THEN explain to the tech guy if you need to. You know you can do both because you know one is just a variant of the other, but HR doesn't know you can do it because they don't know what the gently caress HPLC is in the first place. This is a common problem for us when we try to bring in interns, because HR will gently caress EVERYTHING up. Why the gently caress did HR list my department's last intern request as wanting 5+ years of academic laboratory experience? We have no idea. They're in Costa Rica and never answer the phone. Edit: Clarification -- Most of the people on cafepharma are losers. I wasn't saying most sales employees are losers. (They are, but that wasn't what I meant. )
Sundae fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Apr 11, 2011 |
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Apr 11, 2011 01:55
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I'm glad you added "not Merck" to your post. The horror stories my ex-girlfriend gives me from Merck are on par with PFE. 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. quote: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. I paraphrase an executive's e-mail to my boss: "A 90% failure rate from emerging-market collaboration projects is more cost-effective than internal development." India can gently caress up 90% of the time and still get priority over internal development at my company. Edit: Also, beware Emcure and Aurobindo. They're getting pretty good at development work. We used to work with Emcure a lot, but after our QA department tried to make them change the way they ran the company to match our "standards", they told us to go gently caress ourselves and canceled all future contracts. They must have a lot of people using them if they're willing to totally close out PFE. Sundae fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Apr 11, 2011 |
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Apr 11, 2011 03:09
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My university's rule was "always suits, no exceptions" and they stuck to it to the point where they refused a group of us access to their career fair because we weren't wearing suits with a full four feet of snow on the ground. (The visiting employers were actually pretty pissed off about that. They traveled all the way to Ithaca in a blizzard for the career fair, and almost no students were permitted into the building because they had all dressed appropriately for the storm.) The same applied to job interviews for student research, doctoral interviews, and for actual lab job interviews on-campus. You were in a suit or you damned well weren't getting considered. This may depend on your university or your lab, but my experience with academic labs at Cornell was basically to interview in a suit or get lost. As for pharma, it's absolutely always suits. Even though the dress code for scientists is often very lax (I've worn jeans without a belt for the last three years), your interview is in a suit regardless of your gender. I have never, ever seen an exception to this at any company I've interviewed with or known people at.
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Apr 21, 2011 14:46
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On a different topic... Does anyone else find that the majority (or at least an awful lot) of their laboratory studies are based around eliminating projects rather than advancing them? I just spent the last two weeks proving to biz guys that their idea for a drug had zero chance of working. They refused to believe me unless I went and wasted time producing batches of it to demonstrate the problems in person. Meanwhile, my other project which actually works is lingering on the back-burner while I work on this stupid poo poo. Our project lead is spineless and agrees to every demand that the business groups make, no matter how infeasible it actually is. Some of them require defiance of the laws of time and space! It's pretty impressive in a Kafkaesque sort of way. I actually received a demand for a new product to be developed using a specific process, scaled up and transferred to a manufacturing site in Puerto Rico that doesn't have equipment for that process, and was assigned a due date on it of three weeks before I received the request.
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Apr 21, 2011 17:20
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A timeline of idiocy... Sundae works on a stupid project. Stupid project works in one particular way. Stupid executives ask for three other ways. Sundae wastes nine months proving that these three ways don't work. Sundae presents the one working way, and project is killed. Executive is fired. (Every now and then it actually happens!!) *** A full year passes, fast-forward to this morning *** New executive assigned this old stupid project. Sundae receives e-mail asking for those same three other ways that don't work.  At least I've already done all the work.
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Apr 26, 2011 16:00
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I actually just got out of a meeting explaining the problems her predecessor encountered to her. I think she got the hint, because she slammed shut two of the three lovely options immediately. Only one left to kill. Should be easy enough, because the only way it works is if we ignore math and the concept of space. (Let's just say that they want me to find a way to slam over 1600mg of drug into a capsule small enough for an elderly population to comfortably ingest. Anyone who has ever looked at anything in their medicine cabinet should instantly understand how ridiculous this idea is. For those who haven't... those ibuprofen tablets are usually 200mg. Can you comfortably take EIGHT of them rubber-banded together?)
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Apr 26, 2011 17:53
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Don't ever use a coin in a presentation as a size comparator. Imagine, if you will, a tablet sitting next to a dime, and this photo is in a powerpoint slide. Seems sensible enough, right?  : "Pardon me interrupting for a second. Can you tell me what coin that is?" : "It's a dime.": "Dime?": "Yes, a dime.": "Oh... haven't seen one of those before."The lady on the telecon with me is at our New York corporate offices. : "Yeah, it's a small coin; the smallest we have.": "I can't swallow a coin. It's too big.": "I promise you you can swallow a dime, but that's not the point...": "Come back when it's smaller. Coins are too big."
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Apr 28, 2011 17:19
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I don't understand it either. That's the SECOND person to not recognize a dime. This time I had witnesses since two managers were in the meeting with me to talk about the financial risk profiles for the drug, and they were speechless too. It's a perfectly clear picture. No blur at all. Very clearly a dime! This is the sort of person I like to point to when people ask why the pharma industry can be making so much money and yet fail so spectacularly. With regard to your last comment, nobody at my site is important enough to change the system. It'd be like trying to make a statement against government corruption by taking out the lady behind the desk at your local DMV.
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Apr 28, 2011 21:26
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And yet... watch there be no openings for laboratory technicians.
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May 1, 2011 19:27
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Solkanar512 posted:EDIT: Either that, or research scientists that won't bother to loving clean them after use, loving christ. I can't tell you how many times I can't do a daily balance check because some rear end in a top hat couldn't bother to clean up after themselves. Nothing like leaving a mysterious white powder all over everything. I hate mysterious white powder syndrome! We suffer from it to terrible degrees. One of my labs upstairs is currently unusable. It is coated in powder to the point of a foggy haze on the windows looking into it from the hallway. It has a sign on the door, also. Guess what it says? OEB 5, November 4 2010. No name. No compound number. No indication of what the gently caress is in there other than that it's an OEB 5, and now we need to get a fancy cleaning crew in because it's on EVERYTHING. We can't even vouch for the safety of the breathable air hookups because they're covered in powder. We have a lab booking system. Nobody had the loving room booked on Nov 4. Nobody in my department was even assigned to an active OEB 5 compound at that time. I can only narrow it down to two things... either an rear end in a top hat from another department borrowed our labs at the cost of months of our time, or someone in the December layoffs decided to have some fun at our expense before he got poo poo-canned. People are why we can't have nice things. They are also why balance calibration dates matter so much. I don't even have to calibrate them and I'll agree to that.
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May 5, 2011 15:54
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plasmoduck posted:Hello there! I'm glad to find this biotech/pharma thread, since I've been toying with the idea of joining "the dark side" after my Master's. Sadly, I have virtually no clue what "the industry" actually does, so I'd really appreciate some advice (even if it'll shatter my illusions of "I can do research, keep my dignity AND earn money!" v I'm afraid you've just missed the boat for pure biology in industry. We just announced that we are laying off, depending on specialty, anywhere from 65%-80% of our research discovery departments. Rather extreme percentages, but much of the industry is doing this right now. Small biotechs are your best bet for finding stuff, but don't count on stability or $80,000 wages anymore. If you are stuck on the student-loans-from-hell boat like I was, industry is great for making them disappear in a hurry. Academia is awesome (but has its own problems with lab politics) if money isn't an obstacle. Academia, due to the low salaries, has never been an option for me. My student loan payments are simply too high for the salaries offered.
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May 5, 2011 18:20
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Yeah, the ivory-tower stereotype is absolutely idiotic, and I'd agree that it's about as idiotic as assuming that every scientist in industry is a money-grubbing whore. Only some of us are money-grubbing whores, and often only because we can't afford to be anything else. I had the absolute most kickass lab ever while I was in school, and I was actually sad that, when they offered me a job as lab manager, I couldn't afford to take it. (http://luolabs.bee.cornell.edu/)
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May 5, 2011 19:14
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Want some serious, serious advice? Smack your boyfriend upside the head and tell him to get to the Netherlands pronto.
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May 5, 2011 20:10
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Somehow I assumed you were Dutch. My apologies on the faulty assumption.
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May 5, 2011 20:54
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For curiosity's sake, what companies are you working for where they'll pay for your PhD / subsidize based on your salary? My ex-girlfriend and I were bitching to each other about our companies (Merck and PFE respectively - we're basically arch-rivals now) cutting the education benefits down to nothing. Hers requires so many layers of managerial approval to get through that she never gets approved, while mine sets an $8,000 per year retroactive reimbursement limit, as in I'd have to take out loans, be on the hook for any interest accrued, and then after completing the courses for the year they'd theoretically cut me a check for $8K max. (Completely not worth it, given there's a clause saying that getting laid off during it invalidates the agreement and leaves me on the hook for the entire amount.) I am looking forward to this week. I actually have some lab work to do, and only two asinine meetings to attend! (Or at least, that's all that's on the schedule as of Friday.) A productive week is a rare week indeed these days, and not for lack of effort on my part.
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May 8, 2011 23:49
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| # ¿ May 1, 2024 21:08 |
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Holy moley, decency from out of nowhere! My company gave me a $100 tax-protected bonus (aka grossed-up for tax purposes so I actually get $100) on my next paycheck as "thanks for good work last month" on one of my projects. They must be preparing to fire me or something. Nobody here gets extra rewards for anything, let alone work on a podunk piece of crap project that I've been doing by damnedest to kill.
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May 11, 2011 15:53
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