The primary goal of writing this book is to provide a resource to every scientist and maybe some engineers who are either in school, fresh out of school, in their first science/engineering job, or trying to figure out what they should do next in the later parts of their journey. I’d want this resource to be as comprehensive as possible for the modern age and how using artificial intelligence will influence future.

I’d want this resource to be readily available and relatively easy to access. I’m not the only indie voice writing about science careers. Chemjobber is maybe the OG in the space and there are others like ’s The Aliquot. Vega and ’s definitive guide to Pharma and Biotech layoffs is a great example of a resource that is just available and written by people well versed in Pharma and Biotech (that’s not me necessarily).

The Audience

I suspect the audience who might want to read this type of book is also large. Getting an estimate of how many people graduate with a chemistry degree is challenging. For the numbers below I used ChatGPT who is citing C&EN, Chemistry World, and American Chemical Society who cite data from IPEDS:

1. 34,860 undergraduate degrees awarded in chemistry, biochemistry, and chemical engineering (2021-2022)

2. 4778 masters degrees in chemistry, biochemistry, and chemical engineering (2021-2022)

3. 2000-3000 PhDs in chemistry and biochemistry are awarded roughly every year (starting in 2014 going to 2023).

Overall, this means the total addressable audience for a definitive modern work about a career in science grows roughly by 30,000 people in the United States each year and of those 30,000 about 7,000 get higher degrees.

The Current Literature

A quick search on Amazon for science focused career books yields a not so great result:

1. Alternative Careers in Science, Leaving the Ivory Tower - Maybe one of the earliest reliable books about “alt careers” back when it was assumed a scientist would stay in Academia and a scientist appeared to be defined by those who obtained a PhD. This book, while potentially very good for it’s time is dated and things have changed significantly since its publication.

2. The Perfect Science Career - I generally dislike the title because there is no perfect career in my view. We change as we get older and our “careers” in my opinion should exist to serve our current needs. This books is more focused on getting “the job” and coaching you to get there. Getting that first job is often a huge challenge, but it’s the first in a life of challenges.

3. Next Gen PhD - I’m actually reading this right now myself with the hope that I’ll answer my own problem of deciding what I should do next. I’ll reserve my judgement until I’m finished, but based on the reviews I have high hopes. My only issue is that it’s geared towards PhD holders which is a relatively small population compared to all of the scientists without. A PhD helps get you in some doors, but it can also exclude you from others.

My opinion here is that there is plenty of space for more information. I’m not a career coach or a professional author, but in essence I’m trying to solve for some of my own problems and after 5 years of writing this newsletter I know those same problems exist for others in the audience.

The Churn

The churn is when the rules of the game change—when the system tears itself down and reorganizes itself into something new. Scientists and engineers like you and me, we end up without a job and on the hunt again. Our desire to find fulfillment in our work, while noble, might not really matter if that work disappears. The churn doesn’t really care about who you are, if you have the right skills, the right attitude, or know the right people. When the rules of the game change you need to figure out which way is up and leave the past behind.

I got to experience a teeny tiny piece of the churn back in February of 2025 when I got fired from the FDA, went on the record with the New York Times, and then got rehired. It wasn’t a huge surprise to me, but it was a stressful and eye opening experience. I got lucky that I was able to go back to FDA, but in the back of my mind I’m waiting for that dreaded 9:30 PM email telling me I’m fired again.

Our system of educating scientists and engineers has been good at producing capable scientists and engineers. Our system has historically done a decent job to enable students to gain entry into the working world. This means opportunities for doing research, internships, externships, relevant coursework, and at the end of it all you get a certification that you are a scientist or an engineer.

Hopefully, you have a good grasp of the fundamentals or “first principles” as the tech guys and VCs like to say on podcasts. First principles can help orient you in the churn and figure out which way is up or sideways. Knowing a bit about what is going on in those directions might help you figure out where you should go next and that’s what I want to do here.

Examples of The Churn

There are a few things churning right now as I write this for the newsletter that are significant in their impact to scientists and engineers in the United States. The following are happening concurrently:

1. Funding cuts at traditional granting institutions like the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, United States Department of Agriculture, etc.

2. Tariffs are injecting uncertaintanity into global supply chains and making it difficult to plan where and how to manufacture goods.

3. Artificial Intelligence is making inroads across all organizations and will be used as a tool to enhance productivity of the existing workforce and provide cost savings to shareholders.

If you are a young person trying to get your first job you are probably struggling. If you are experienced and also looking for a job I suspect you are also struggling. If it’s not Artificial Intelligence then it’s COVID-19 or the Great Financial Crisis or the Dot Com bubble bursting. If I know one thing for certain is that there will be another event that causes churn and it will not be your fault.

The Good News

An education that is built on science and engineering with a bit of the liberal arts means that you can probably do anything you want given enough time, energy and effort. This means you can probably do research, communicate results, potentially build something new either physically or virtually and in general add a lot of value to society.

Most people who consider themselves scientists are going to be working in what is known as “the industry,” or generally not academia. If science is the discovery of the fundamental laws that govern the universe then industry is the application of those laws to benefit humans, maybe not all humans, but generally aimed at our benefit. Industry is where the money is and therefore this is where jobs and careers are built.

The biggest misconception that I had as a scientist was that the only career worth having was one based in research and developing something new. The more time I spent in industry the more I realized there was a much bigger world out there.

My (our?) goal here is to explore that world and bring it to you—the reader who is either a seasoned scientist who sits in the back of a conference room and says, “I tried that 20 years ago and it didn’t work” or that an idealistic young person who wants to make the world a better place and cannot wait to start.

The world is yours.

Tony

This newsletter was an experiment borne out of frustration and boredom and it ran consistently for about 3 years. My starting materials (frustration and boredom) have become scarce. It has been difficult to maintain a consistent pace of weekly or even monthly writing. I don’t see any need to stop because in theory I can just pick back up where I left off as I am doing now. In some sense I’ve realized that the larger the audience the more difficult it can be to write. I kind of miss the rebellious days when I was excited to have 100 people reading the newsletter consistently.

To the young scientists out there who are just starting their career my final advice for your early career is to go out and try things. This might be taking a job you don’t want in order to get out of your parent’s house. It might be taking on a new responsibility in your lab. It could be deciding to go back to graduate school to get a PhD or an MBA or maybe even going to law school. The great thing about an experiment is you can always adjust as you get more information. You can tweak the conditions and try and change the outcomes.

I think sometimes you might change the conditions so much that you end up outside of the laboratory space you’ve occupied for over a decade either real or virtual. This is exactly what I did. I am now doing something that I couldn’t have predicted 15 years ago. In November of 2009 I had just started my first post undergraduate job at few months prior, and I was living in a house full of random roommates, all of this was sourced via Craigslist. The company was a “start-up” that was 15 years old and on a Series C funding round and the house was essentially a more modern trailer of Animal House.

This is going out the day after an election too. Many of you are probably going to be upset and some of you might be really happy. In these situations when things seem dire or amazing, I think back to the below scene from the movie Blow. I think about the scene with Robin Williams and Matt Damon in Goodwill Hunting when he talks about the painting. I think about the last line of The Great Gatsby (I’m going to assume you know it already).

To me, what these scenes impart, is that we are hopelessly moving on despite the current, despite whatever outcomes we’ve been dealt, and despite the conditions we are facing right now. When I was younger, I viewed these same scenes through the lens of not having a lot of control in how life comes at you. The 2008 financial crisis felt really unfair to me as I’m sure the COVID-19 crisis felt really unfair to a lot of people in 2020. There is always a next crisis. Keep rowing.

The best part about being an early career scientist is that you don’t know a lot of stuff about the world around you and about yourself. The process of figuring stuff out and then getting results you predicted and wanted, or thought might be possible is about the most fun you can have in life. Also, knowing with certainty the results of a specific experiment are boring and uninteresting. Every time I write here, I’m running an experiment. I have a hypothesis of how it will be received. I don’t actually know until I hit publish.

Talk to you soon,

Tony

I picked the biggest chemical company in the world to see if I could glean any specific trends in the acquisitions and divestitures data over the last 13 years. Maybe you could argue that acquisitions are slowing down from 2017 to present and divestments are on the rise. BASF has also indicated a significant number of layoffs in Germany in an effort to cut costs.

In total, 45 divestitures have occurred at BASF compared to 37 acquisitions since 2010. That is 82 deals over the last 13 years. If you are an employee working within any of the parts of the business where those deals are taking place you’ve likely experienced a feeling of intense precarity and precariousness combined with personal insecurity means you have likely questioned, “should I get a new job?”

If you think about this too much you end up in a constant state of fear or anxiety and this gets even worse when you have a family or dependents that are reliant on your income.

The Only Constant Is Change

A lot of my previous coworkers have expressed a desire for a steady and stable job that pays well enough to afford a middleclass lifestyle. Many of my former coworkers have even expressed an interest in taking less pay in exchange for stability. Sadly, I don’t think this is viable for most careers in chemistry (industrials or pharma). In careers that span 40+ years as scientists, engineers, or associated professionals we tend to end up wanting longer term roles (stability) and we find ourselves specializing by staying somewhere for a long time.

Stability is important if we want to raise kids, have a family, and take on a 30-year mortgage to buy a house. Our professional lives tend to get easier when we know a very specialized amount of information and get regarded as experts. This narrow expertise can also make us quite fragile when technology moves on from our expertise. As companies start to consolidate and remove costs, I think it becomes more challenging to remain that expert without being willing to uproot your life.

The overall goal of any M&A activity (at least from what I can understand) is to figure out ways to remove cost in order to improve EBITDA, and maybe make a customer experience better. Cost reduction can be found in places like SG&A, R&D, and procurement. You might need less sales, marketing, regulatory compliance, engineering staff and less R&D due to consolidation. Instead of paying for 5 offices with labs maybe you can get away with 2 or 3 and less staff in those offices with labs. Your procurement teams might be able to negotiate better prices at higher volumes of purchase. These activities are often good for shareholders, but not necessarily good for employees.

These actions are especially difficult for middle managers who have climbed from the ranks of being an individual contributor to managing a small team. These people have often, “paid their dues,” or endured a lot of shit to get where they are and then merging with a competitor or being bought by a competitor typically means their jobs might be at risk. From Harvard Business Review on M&A back in 2001 which still feels and rings true:

Let’s start at the top, with the senior managers from both companies. Especially in a merger of equals, this piece is always messy, time-consuming, and political. Management teams focus their energies on the battle to maintain their positions, and the business suffers. This pattern is repeated all the way down the ranks. Problems exist even in acquisitions where one company is much larger. The best people from the new company are likely to leave. When mixed teams remain, employees must reconcile company cultures. Years after such mergers, it is common for managers from acquirer Alpha to describe an employee from the acquired company as a Beta company guy.

In the current world of chemicals, you might be merged with a company and trying to reconcile that culture or be spun off on your own trying to “make it” out in the cold alone without your parent company. You might only have a few years to demonstrate that things are working before some other action happens. These types of scenarios, especially when the actions are public, are detrimental to employees who often feel like they have less control over their professional careers than they had once thought.

My concern is that the more this occurs the more likely the very talented people will decide to leave the industry completely. Perhaps this means that very talented technical people decide to transition to completely different careers by learning new skills on their own. I think the best and brightest individual contributors in chemicals tend to come to a point where they decide, “fuck this, I’m out.”

As the more talented people decide to exit the harder the businesses become to run efficiently. Soon, and I think it’s happening as I write this and will continue, companies that were once seen as “industry leaders” will just become hallowed out shells of their former selves.

Maybe this is for the better.

Depreciation, Capacity, and Innovation

Large capital expenditures mean there are assets that can be depreciated to offset tax liability of chemical companies. Eventually, those assets reach a point of complete depreciation and as a society we end up having a lot of really old manufacturing capacity that is still being operated. The problem with old manufacturing capacity is that it becomes even more difficult to innovate when the market you want to disrupt has excess capacity that keeps costs down.

How much volumetric chemical reactor capacity do we have right now and how much of it is being utilized? How can that capacity be redeployed to those seeking it? A marketplace of understanding available manufacturing capacity, what the capabilities are, and who needs what right now could be a whole company that exists as a confidential contract manufacturer. Chemical innovation doesn’t have to be 100% exclusive to just making safer, more efficient chemicals and polymers and new drugs.

So where does all the chemical talent go if it’s not necessarily in the top 100 chemical companies or top 200? I suspect that some might transition to a product manager role and then exit to something more lucrative like software technology. I know of more than a few that “learned how to code.” I’m betting a bunch are flocking to start-ups seeking disruption of the industry.

The New Wave

Getting in early with a start-up seeking to disrupt the chemical industry might be a great way to play the lottery with your skills to try and get a little bit rich off of your potential equity. Getting in early with a deep understanding of your competition’s vulnerabilities while also applying a basic understanding of regulations, customer relationships, and the product development life cycle can help supercharge a start-up.

If start-ups feel risky they are at least somewhat insulated from the macroeconomic environment through investor funds. A former coworker of mine who recently retired once remarked before we parted ways that she wasn’t ever sure she had more a few years funding to keep her employed at legacy companies. Just because a company might look stable, talk about stability, and grow at a slow and stable pace doesn’t mean they are stable. If there is no daring plan for growth that is adequately staffed then it’s the same as buying a lottery ticket for the shareholders.

A small team with minimal oversight and a big carrot can achieve way more in a year or two than a large team with mostly a stick incentive. If large chemical companies want to stay relevant they need to change the way they innovate and change how they invest in their innovation. The current process of cost cutting to maintain profitability and taking the oldest manufacturing capacity offline to keep prices just holds us back.

In a world where the goal is to incrementally remove cost in order to return money to shareholders you get what you pay for—marginally worse stuff.

Tony

In this thread I took a somewhat cynical view of the management track, and I think one fundamental flaw in my thinking over the past 15 years has been that promotion ultimately leads to management of people and teams. This doesn’t have to be the case, but I think we tend to view promotions in a very linear and narrow paths in the science and engineering fields.

Management is Not ALWAYS the Way

The typical path a scientist views as one to success is usually BS → Junior Scientist role → PhD → Independent Scientist role in industry/academia → Management of other scientists → happiness, money, respect, honors, and success —> Nirvana.

This has been my view since 2009 when I had a BS in chemistry, but I think this view is just too narrow. Why is it that we primarily see management as a pathway towards success and why does management get paid a lot of money?

Anne Helen Peterson and Charlie Warzel wrote about this management role in their book Out Of Office (part of my summer reading list). The relevant stuff I took from Out of Office around this is that management tends to get paid marginally better and has access to better promotions, more money, visibility to the executives, and more work flexibility. The path towards management is doing well in your role and Warzel and Peterson discuss this phenomenon of good individual contributors being promoted to management roles with little to no training on how to be a manager much less be a good one. Your excellence at science or engineering doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be excellent at managing a team of scientists and engineers.

A feeling of inadequacy or being in the deep end of the pool tends to make me want to thrash around quite violently and try to “work” my way to competence. This tends to be a good strategy when your work is just some molecules in a flask in a hood, but when your work is the management of others it can lead to micromanagement, and just overall poor outcomes. As one manager told me early on in my career, “you get promoted to your level of incompetence.” If your level of incompetence is being the CEO of a company or a senior leadership role at the “top of the ladder,” then it can be quite lucrative.

If the management of others, especially a team comprised of others just like you, sounds like a nightmare scenario I think we need to think about other pathways and maybe examine the ideas around what makes us happy at work and happy in life?

A Myriad of Paths to Take

Over the summer I also read and finished The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd on the recommendation of a reader (thank you vgr). The book is at a minimum thought provoking and accurately describes how the majority of us are on pre-determined paths. Scientists and engineers might be on either a management path or a highly valued individual contributor path with the thought that you will provide value to the shareholders of your company. The outcomes in these paths are predictable and usually secure, at least until the next recession anyway, and traveling them can be a really great way to learn new skills, meet people, and try new things.

I think being an early career scientist or engineer is all about exploring and figuring out which paths feel right for you at the time and then re-evaluating and changing things up if you want. It’s about exploring while you still have minimal responsibilities (e.g., young children, sick parents, a house that needs $200k of investment to not fall down).

I was on the product development path from 2009-2022 and while on that path I took a slight detour to get a PhD with the thought that it would make me better at developing products from a first principles perspective. It definitely helped and by the time I was getting ready to jump off this path I was leading co-leading a team towards launching a re-engineered product out into the world. You can buy it at a lumber yard or Home Depot near you. I was on the precipice of being some sort of manager of people at some point and yet I decided to step off from that path and go join the FDA.

How long will I stay on this regulatory path? I have no idea, but it’s been fun over the last 6 months.

Tactical Advice for Promotions

I was getting coffee with an old coworker from 10+ years ago just before Christmas Eve and we talked for two hours about work, life, and what it might take to succeed in this ever-changing world. One thing that really stuck with me after that coffee was thinking of your coworkers as your clients and wanting to do the best for your client.

Keep your clients happy

Your manager, the CEO of the company, the technician you are mentoring, the operator you are reworking a batch with are all your clients and you are their consultant. Each of your clients have different wants and needs, but you need think about how to prioritize each of those clients. Sometimes the lowest level employee that you work with (e.g., the technician with a high school degree, maybe a BS in chemistry) is the most important too because are likely doing the tasks you don’t have time for and a mistake on their part means a failure in your own role. Learning how to manage the expectations and needs of your clients will ultimately set you up for the next part.

The Ask

If you’ve made it this far, I’ve tried to show you that a promotion will not necessarily lead to happiness. There are plenty of depressed millionaires out there and money isn’t necessarily the key to happiness, but it can be a lynchpin. Figure out how much money you might need to be happy and factor in all of the kids, vacations, housing prices, and car maintenance. This might take a while. I’ll wait…

Ok, so now that you have that number you need to ask yourself, “can you get to that?”

You might find that due to cost of living, location of your employer, and all of your wants in life that you need to become an executive, not necessarily a CEO, but maybe a VP or a Director. If that sounds like a life worth living, then ask for how you can get there with your current employer. If you think, “I’d be happy making $175,000/year managing a small team of scientists,” then I’d say that sounds very possible.

If I have an aspiration for the new year, it’s to be forthright in asking for what I want professionally. I hope that you can figure this out for yourself too. What happens if we just ask for what we really want and try to be honest while keeping in mind the needs of our clients?

Taking the view of your coworkers as your clients is critical and this piece didn’t fall into place for me until a few weeks ago. If you can understand and anticipate the needs of your managers or executives, then you ultimately know a little bit of what it means to be one.

Promotions are a combination of reward and responsibility to retain talent within a corporation. If you are valued and your employer thinks you can do more then you get promoted and you can facilitate this by just asking and being direct. This sounds simple, but it’s really difficult. If you aren’t sure what you want to do, then see above about different paths.

If you aren’t good at your job or it’s just not a good fit, then I’d encourage you to move on until you find a place that clicks.

I’ve been moving around for over a decade, but I think I’ve maybe found a place that works for me. I guess I’ll really know in another year or two.

Tony

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When I graduated in 2009, I just wanted to get a job during the “greatest recession since the Great Depression.” From 2009-2012 I worked a pretty good job for an interesting start-up and then I went to graduate school. I thought chemistry was cool and fun, but it wasn’t a strong part of my identity just yet.

After I defended my thesis in 2016 and an intense four years of studying and research, I had a job lined up (pro tip: don’t schedule your defense till you get a job). I’ve been working steadily since the summer of 2016 with my PhD since then and I’ve come to the conclusion that having a good reason for doing what you are doing is important. Just wanting a job because its 3-4x your graduate school salary wears off quick. After all, you learn to spend what’s in your pocket.

Working a job for money is normal. It’s noble in some ways even, but I think by itself it is a terrible motivator. If you are reading this newsletter as a scientist, an engineer, or aspire to be one with thoughts of being rich then I’ve got some bad news.

It’s not that it cannot happen over time or if you found a start-up and achieve a lucrative exit. It’s just unlikely and thus, I think it can be a really tough area if you are just here for the money. If you wanted a lot of money, I think there are other more lucrative careers such as being a lawyer, doctor, finance and investment banking, consulting.

Money enables modern life, but is chasing the dollars going to keep you in the career long term? I think you need more reasons. Let’s think about it.

Find Your Reasons

Money only ever took me so far and when my salary started to stagnate, I’d just hop to the next gig. The problem with this is you soon start to approach your limit. Early career chemists with a PhD in a non-pharma role I think tend to top out around $130-140k/year in total compensation. If you want to go higher you need to become a technical fellow or a manager of people. It’s tough to get those roles these days because they are becoming rarer, and I think those jobs are becoming more difficult.

Money tends to stop being important when you feel unsafe too.

I distinctly remember going to South Dakota to run a trial in a factory that had been shut down supposedly by my company’s products. I got delayed getting there due to a bomb cyclone and then after a harrowing drive in a storm that went from rain to ice in the blink of an eye in a rental car I got to the town. Ran the trial the next day and figured things out (it wasn’t my product’s problem), but a blizzard had descended over the town during the day, and I was stuck for another night. When people from South Dakota tell you that you shouldn’t drive in the snow you should probably listen.

The next morning, I found that there were no flights leaving from the airport I flew into, so I ended up getting a flight out of MSP, but I had to drive 3 hours east to get to the airport. For half of that drive, I guided my little Hyundai Elantra across an ice-covered “main road.” I think in that moment I realized that I wasn’t doing my job for the money, but I didn’t have any other good reasons to be doing it either at that moment. Why was I doing all of this stuff to end up coming up with a solution for a problem that wasn’t mine to solve in the first place and risking my life in the process?

The best reasons I ever had for being a professional chemist in the industry was that I was doing the job mostly to keep the operators and the people who worked in the plant employed and trying to make products a bit more sustainable wherever I could. I’ve always felt like I’ve been able to figure out my next opportunity, but if you’ve ever spent a lot of time in a chemical plant or factory you might realize that a lot of people don’t have that same luxury and sometimes that job as an operator is the best job in the area that they could get.

Ensuring the successful launch of a new product and its long-term success (technical service) is often the chemist’s job. You support your customers. You support your plants. Your company’s executives and shareholders get taken care of as a benefit and you get to keep your job and your salary. It’s just that sometimes investor and shareholder value is often the only priority and your side dreams of sustainability get washed away a bit.

I think if you want to stay in the chemical industry for the long haul you need to figure out why you want to do it and it cannot be for the money. If you want a lot of money, just try to figure out how to break into the private equity industry or go become a patent lawyer. If not saying you need the “this company aligns with my core values” mission reason but knowing why you want to do this stuff is important and it’s going to get you through the brutal layoffs, the shitty commute when your friends are remote, and when your supply chain blows up and everything is on fire.

Knowing why before you go into something is helpful too. When I started, it was 100% about sustainability and getting stuff to market that was more sustainable than the old stuff. The longer I worked the more I realized how hard it was to make something “sustainable,” and that term is loaded with different meanings to different people. A CEO might view sustainability as something completely different than a chemist or a chemical engineer.

Guess who wins on the definition game.

Tony

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Being a likable person in sales seems to be a given, but for a technical person I think it tends to get overlooked in lieu of acquiring a deeper understanding of a technical area. In a prior issue of this newsletter, I had a long quote from “The Bear” wherein the protagonist gives a 7-minute monologue about cutting people out of his life and spending more time in the kitchen and that as he cut more people out his life, his life got quieter, and he got better at being a chef. This happens all the time in science too and after a while when you start to interact with “regular people” you come off as kind of a weirdo or “difficult to talk to,” or as someone in sales might say, “I can’t take this person on a customer visit.”

It can be very easy to 1) not talk to anyone during intense graduate research and 2) only interact with the people who are in your program. In your program it might be normal to work 80-hour weeks, talk to people in the lab on Saturday afternoons, and interact with Principal Investigators who work not only as much as you but perhaps want to see their own work ethic reflected in their students. If you were a little [insert self-description here] before graduate school, then this might be amplified after you finish your graduate degree.

If I have ever possessed a unique skill as a scientist, it has been an innate ability to get people to trust and like me as a collaborator, a coworker, a supplier, a customer, or as a random person they met at a conference. There were plenty of people who didn’t like me, but I was able to get enough to form what I call a “coalition of support.” Working in any company is a team sport and your success is often contingent on people helping each other. If people do not like you because of [insert your issues here] then there is a good chance you will not succeed, or your career will be capped.

I was catching up with an old friend recently and we were talking about how often everyone you work with is super qualified or technically brilliant on paper. When trying to hire it often comes down to figuring out who you might get along with the best as opposed to trying to assess who might be the most technically accomplished. Being able to connect with strangers, gain their trust, and get them to like you is a great skill to have and when you pair it with technical excellence you are likely going to be unstoppable.

There is this clip from the movie Spy Game that comes to mind when Robert Redford is trying to teach a younger Brad Pitt the finer points of being a spy. Also, the more spy movies and shows I watch the more it appears to be an awful job.

An Example

When I was working at Hexion (I guess it’s Bakelite Synthetics now) we had this process of requesting Safety Data Sheets through SAP for experimental samples we had created in the lab to send to customers. When working on a customer project we had to have an SDS to ship our samples for testing by our customers because we adhered to the law. It might have taken me a few weeks to even figure out something that worked as far as I could tell in the lab and for most people it might take you 3-4 weeks to even get your SDS approved and sent to you by the people in the product stewardship (regulatory compliance) team.

This resulted in customers being upset at not getting their samples, which involved them calling their account managers, who reported this to their managers. Samples not going out meant things were going slower than anticipated and being slow means more cost. When margins are already slim, the company is losing money due to debt payments, and/or losing volume to competitors then being slow at getting samples to customer is about the worst thing you can do.

Everyone I worked with complained, frequently, about this issue of not getting our Safety Data Sheets faster. From what I could tell, no one was happy, but no one really ever spoke to the people writing the Safety Data Sheets either. Everyone knew it was a problem, but no one had any solutions. I thought this was weird, so I looked up the person who was responsible for mine one day, and I gave her call on the phone.

I found out that this one person was responsible for generating Safety Data Sheets not only for the whole R&D unit where I was, but for other divisions of the company too. She got way more requests to generate Safety Data Sheets that she could handle alone, and they took a lot of time to finish. Often, the submissions were not necessarily complete, which also made her job more difficult.

This was a broken business process and there was no one working to figure out how to make it better. This one broken business process slowed down the product development process and likely pushed out timelines by months and the only thing that I think the executives saw was that R&D was “slow.” I eventually worked out a way to give her a heads up I was going to submit a request, outlined the importance of that submission in an email, and then I would submit it via the enterprise software. The sheer number of submissions in the system resulted in a situation of my submission getting lost in “the pile,” and this is what was happening to my coworkers.

I think the reason I succeeded in this particular example was due to approaching the situation as a true novice and seeking to “understand why,” as opposed to demanding results. We are all often at the mercy of broken business workflows or processes that can negatively impact us individually, but overall organizations as a whole. Forgiveness is built on understanding and we can only understand each other if we are willing to communicate and be real.

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Zooming Back Out

If you take anything away from this at this point it should be this: Don’t be a dick.

You’d be surprised at what you can learn and the types of people who are willing to help you if you are there to listen and are willing to try and make their working life better. You’d also be surprised at what people will tell you and/or do to help you out if you are new or express your ignorance. I kind of feel ridiculous writing about this topic because it seems obvious to me, but I think it is something that often gets overlooked Being friends or at least friendly with your coworkers is one of the oldest ways to network. The longer you work the bigger your network. Eventually, you’ll need your network and when you do I hope they help you.

Tony

This is the first guest post from a reader of the newsletter about her own career journey. I first met Aurora virtually back in 2021 when she was working at the American Chemical Society (ACS) and she pitched that I write something for the ACS Green Chemistry Institute newsletter. I wrote it and you can check it out here. Aurora has a background in the same sort of chemistry and materials science area that I do, but I got a sense in talking to her that she wasn’t going to go down the same path I took. In thinking about my own career path I’ve thought of myself as a surfer trying to catch a wave and ride it into another.

Aurora spent a significant amount of time figuring things out and this is her story, advice to others, and hopefully inspiration to make the change you’ve been thinking about.

In reading and editing this story from Aurora I think she’s making her own waves.

Tony

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Intentionally Directing a Career Path

by Aurora Ginzburg

In January of 2022 I did a scary thing and left my first post-PhD job without another position lined up.* I knew I needed to take a hard pivot from the jobs I was most obviously qualified for and spend time exploring what else I could do with my professional skills, expanding them if necessary. I am now three weeks into an absolute dream position that I never would have known to look for back in January. I have learned a ton about career development during these past seven months, in large part thanks to others sharing their stories and offering to extend a helping hand to me, and I hope to pay a bit of that forward with this post. If I get the time I would love to turn this into a series of posts, but we’ll see, for now I am going to give a succinct list of actionable career development advice based on things that have worked for me. I am going to generalize this to be applicable to as broad of an audience as possible, but it is probably most relevant for people who have a STEM PhD.

There are many resources out there to help you prepare your resume and interview skills, tailoring them for each job. While those are important, I will not harp on them here. I want to take this space to share the more non-traditional things that worked for me.

• Research what you want! This does not have to be a specific position, though it may be, but be bold and greedy and think about what your perfect job has. Consider what you like/used to like about your field, as well as what you don’t. Talk to your friends from graduate school about their jobs, ask specific questions, make a list of what parts of their job you would want. Read job postings, read Medium.com articles, talk to anyone doing anything remotely interesting to you and learn about their work. STEM degrees are incredibly versatile and you can supplement your degree quickly with new skills if you are deficient in an area. Through many conversations I came to realize that my ideal situation would be a remote job, focusing on immediate, large-scale, sustainable change wherein I am performing data analysis and crafting scientific stories. You need to have an idea of what you want (this may change over time), so that you can express it in a 30-60 second answer to “tell me about yourself”.

• Practice your introduction. Expect that every person you talk to will ask some variant of “tell me about yourself”. I used to use this as an opportunity to go through my career chronologically. That is fine but isn’t going to best serve you. Do the politician thing where you answer the question you wish they had asked which is “what are you looking for and how can I help you get that?”. They *could* ask this later, but why take a chance? Get to the heart of what you want early and expand on your story.

I took the approach of actually writing out my introduction as a paragraph and memorizing it. It evolved as I learned more about what I was looking for, figured out how to market certain aspects of my background, and had more relevant skills to highlight. You want to be imaginative and open to changing your ideas about your background and your goals. I think something along the lines of this format works well: 

• 1-2 sentences about what specifically you are looking for in your career/next job.

• 2-3 sentences about how your past experiences prepared you for what you are looking for and how you ended up here.

• 1 sentence about what you are hoping to get out of this call.

Having some anecdotes humanizes the whole interaction too and it’s easier to remember a person with a good story.

• Supplement your skills. Once I realized what I was looking for in a job, it became apparent that most of the opportunities that excited me were going to require more computer science skills than I had. There is some really innovative work being done in data science, a field that wasn’t really a thing back when I started my undergraduate degree in chemistry. Data science is an umbrella term that encompasses a lot of different kinds of work, usually involving the application of  statistics and computer science to a domain-specific data set. It is propelling a range of meaningful scientific innovation due to the new wealth of available data. I didn’t know much about coding but wanted to be as employable as possible and had been pretty dazzled by some machine learning applications for batteries and enzymes. 

In about four months I learned Python, SQL, common data science/machine learning libraries, and built some portfolio work on GitHub. I did this by spending about $75 dollars on Udemy courses. I treated these courses as a full-time job. The internet is such an amazing resource and MOOC courses have changed the way people can gain new skills.  This ended up being pretty important for my current role because while I am relying most heavily on my background in quantitative analysis and sustainability, there is also a need to understand how to manage large amounts of data and design scalable analysis processes. I predict we are going to need more scientists with computer science skills, so if you have the time, I highly recommend any course by Jose Portilla on Udemy. This also shows initiative and a growth-mindset on your resume.

• Find your people. Again, we are so lucky to have the internet. Gone are the days of needing to fly somewhere to make a networking connection or know someone to make an introduction. That said, it is not always easy to find your people online. You can try the LinkedIn cold message, it will work sometimes and is a fine way to meet people. However, there is no bias to this process in finding *helpful* people, or hiring managers. To find the helpers you need to find where they hang out. This will really depend on what your priority is in your next job, is it a specific technology, purpose or location? I was focused on sustainability, chemistry/materials science, data science, and the west coast, so I found many groups to join online in these areas. The most helpful ones were on Slack, though there were some on Meetup and Discord that I liked as well. I had no idea how much hiring is done on Slack now, but it is a lot! If you can find a Slack community dedicated to what you are interested in, there will likely be channels in there where hiring managers post about specific needs they have. Add your picture to your profile and engage in these groups, the more you can come across as a real human behind a screen, the better. You can also use the search feature to find other users in the group you may want to connect with (e.g., I reached out to people who had a similar background as me by using certain keywords to find older posts by them).

You will also find resources within these communities. I came across some awesome newsletters (including ones with job listings that aren’t cross-posted to job aggregator websites!) and more niche job posting websites. There are so many different groups and the ones that worked for me might not work for you. True online communities are powerful and finding one where you fit in can change your life, it certainly changed mine. That said, if you are passionate about working on sustainable technologies, leave a comment below or reach out to me via LinkedIn and I can point you in the right direction. Finally, a good career coach, someone with a network and a wealth of experience from their own career, can also be immensely helpful. If you do reach out I might know someone that could help you.

• Become a professional socializer. In the era of Zoom you should aim to be able to “hop on a quick call” at the drop of a hat and have a conversation with anyone that leaves the impression that you are intelligent and enjoyable to talk to. Sound intimidating? Ya it is, but practice helps. I forced myself to have 1-4 “chats” a day with professional strangers for over a month. This served a lot of important functions: network building, career exploration, and social skill tuning. It also served to keep my eye on the prize. Every day that I talked to people who had interesting careers reminded me how badly I wanted that for myself, and how capable I was of achieving it.

When people told me to do this in the past I used to worry myself with “but what will we talk about” and come in with a long list of questions. My refined approach is to make sure to get in my introduction, whether they ask or not, but then let them steer the conversation. Unless I needed something quite specific from them, I was there to appreciate their time and whatever it was they wanted to share. I came prepared with a basic understanding of their background from LinkedIn, but only brought up parts of it if there were lulls in the conversation or it naturally made sense. If they wanted to interview me, I was happy to play ball, if they wanted to tell me about their entire life history, that was fine too. In general, the more you can parrot someone’s behavior and engage in active listening, the better of an impression you will leave. For more on the emotional intelligence necessary to get what you want from people out of a conversation, I highly recommend the book Never Split the Difference by former FBI hostage negotiator, Chris Voss.

After talking to 50+ people, you start to realize how individualized every person’s perspective and advice is. To be honest, >75% of the advice I received wasn’t relevant or helpful to me. But I learned to sift through it and take the gems, always being polite and curious about that person’s experience. Just remember that one person’s experience doesn't have to be yours. Maybe they went back to school, maybe they paid $20k for a bootcamp, maybe they suffered through a job they hated for 5 years to end up where they are now, etc. I always reflected on my calls by recounting their path and then asking myself “at what cost”, deciding on what I wasn’t willing to accept for my own life. Or at the very least what would be a backup plan. All this to say, I am incredibly appreciative of the time that every person gifted me, and the vulnerability they expressed when sharing their career stories with me, but not every person was someone I would need to talk to again. When you strike gold with a new connection, you will know it. Follow-up with those people and be intentional in keeping those connections going.

• Qualifications matter, but not as much as you may think. This is super job-specific, but in general, if the job interests you, go for it. Figure out how to market your relevant experience and what translational skills you have. If the company likes you, they may be able to change the job to be more appropriate for you. You do need to have the ability to solve whatever problem they are addressing with this position, so finding out what they actually need, rather than the wish list provided in a job posting, is key. If you can solve their problem, explain that in a cover letter/interview. Studies have shown that men are likely to overestimate their qualifications, while women underestimate theirs. So in particular, if you aren’t a man, apply for the long shot job anyway or reach out to your contact** at the company and ask if they would be open to someone with X skills and background.

If you have made it this far then you are likely toying with the idea of a job change. I would be remiss not to acknowledge the intense emotional impact of being in this place. I personally don’t like writing about my emotional experiences publicly, but I am happy to chat about it individually. It is easy to read articles like this and think “it all worked out for that person, why can’t I ever have any luck” and sink into despair. I’ve been there. It is okay to feel all of that, but also use that feeling as motivation to keep pushing forward because luck is a combination of timing and preparation. If you dedicated many years to your schooling then you deserve to be professionally fulfilled and it is within your power.

Cheers,

Aurora Ginzburg

Feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn, but it may take me a bit of time to respond because of how much I have on my plate at the moment.

* While it was stressful for me, I don’t take for granted that I was able to do this, and not everyone has that freedom and privilege. I would encourage everyone to play their cards as well as they can, but recognize that we all have different hands in life.

** I wasted a lot of time blind applying for jobs on LinkedIn and big company career pages where I didn’t know anyone at the company. It rarely got me anywhere, and I tailored my resume and cover letters. If you weren’t invited to apply and don’t know anyone there, I would advise against this process unless the job hasn’t been widely posted or it is so specialized that you are one of a few people truly qualified for it. The numbers just aren’t in your favor. To give you an idea of the numbers, I had a hiring manager in the semiconductor industry tell me that he gets 60 applications, *after* HR has filtered them for only qualified candidates, and he has to decide who to contact from that stack with the very little time he has.

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Hey there,

When I was first starting out as a career scientist in 2009 I had no network. The economy was in shambles and I needed a job. Whenever I would read an article about getting a job (cause I didn’t have one) there was ultimately some advice about “reach out to your network,” or “attend networking events like career fairs.”

My network at that point was some chemistry majors in the same boat as me and some non-chem majors. Some people went to grad school and others moved back in with their parents because job offers got pulled. Some of my friends actually had jobs, just not in the field that they had studied. The internship I had been working at for years told me they had no money to hire me full time due to lack of funding.

No one I knew could get me a job or even get my resume in front of someone who could get me an interview. I would have loved to have a network, but as an undergraduate this can be difficult if you didn’t work the right internships. I had no one telling me what to do and I was just trying to figure it out as I went along. I eventually got a job at a little glucose sensor company called Senseonics.

After 13 years of being in various states of employment or being in graduate school I have started to recognize that I do have some sort of network and this network has at times delivered and recently it delivered in a big way. I got my new job through networking. I wasn’t even really looking for a job, but when opportunity comes knocking I usually answer the door.

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On Building A Network Of Anchors

My strongest network is from my former coworkers. These are people who know me in a professional sense. My professional life is often completely separated from my personal life except maybe here. The people I’ve worked with can vouch for my knowledge, skills, abilities, and hopefully my tendency to be a good teammate. I would (and have) vouch for any of the people I’ve worked with in the event I found them to be moderately good and overall likable.

Sometimes in a professional setting people will say things like, “I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to do a job.” Sometimes those people can be brilliant and key members to very technical teams, but they can also be horrible co-workers at times. In the physical sciences and engineering it can be easy to encounter people who just care about doing the work and everything else including your feelings don’t matter.

If you’ve worked with this person and they were suddenly looking for a new job would you help them? You’re a human and if this person made your work life difficult it’s unlikely that you would vouch for this person no matter their talent. Well, maybe you would if you had ulterior motives? This is because we are humans and not robots.

Being a pleasant co-worker and being a work friend is the best advice I can give you for building a strong network. This has happened for me primarily by being in offices/labs with my coworkers and getting to go out to lunch or have coffees with them. I think of these people as the anchors to my network.

Being in person and on location early in my career was helpful and necessary since I worked primarily in a laboratory.

Casting A Net

Having an online social presence is what I would consider casting a net and trying to make some connections. I’ve got some great people within my network who I’ve met through the internet (never actually met them in person) that I would never have gotten if I hadn’t been on LinkedIn, Twitter, or writing this newsletter.

Yes, this newsletter is a form of networking for me, but it could be for you too. There are comments that people sometimes post to here, there is a LinkedIn page, I’m on Twitter. Investors, start-up founders, and other professional chemists hang out here reading this stuff too.

You can search and find 1000+ people on the internet who are doing what you want to do or who might be working in the area that you have been training for in school for years. Why not cast a net out and see if you can get someone to talk to you.

The Art Of The Cold Ask

Imagine a total stranger wrote to you and wanted something from you. What is a message you would respond to? Here is a good example of what I would use:

Hey,

I’m writing to see if you might help me out. I’m [whatever you want to call yourself] and I’m looking to get a job in the field that you are in now. If you’ve got a few minutes I’d really like to talk for 10-15 minutes about your career.

Thanks

[Your Name]

It’s surprising what people might do for you if you just ask, to be clear most will not answer you, but you only need a few. Some people don’t want to talk and that’s normal. Others might want to talk, but you can never agree on a time, and others might just have time for you right now. I think they key is getting that first contact and not asking for anything than you have already.

For instance if I work at a company where you want to work and you just wrote the message above. We speak for 15 minutes about my work life and then you asked me to help you get a job it’s not going to go well because I don’t know you. How does a 15 minute conversation translate to me putting your resume in my manager’s inbox?

I might do this for someone that I worked with for a year, but a 15 minute conversation is a tough sell. I might even do what you want, but when someone asks me the inevitable “is this person any good?” I might not have a good answer. In some ways this might hurt more than it helps.

If you are able to make a genuine connection to someone let it linger and don’t press to hard. If you do then you are likely going to be thought of as a transactional person and the value this person brings to you is what they can deliver now as opposed to later. To me, it’s all about the long term value.

I don’t even think I’m that great of a social networker, but try treating these people who barely have any connection to you as you might a stranger out on the street. If they can help you out for 15 minutes that’s great, but I wouldn’t expect or ask for anything more unless they signal that they would be happy to go the extra mile.

Building a great network takes time and after 13 years mine is just starting to resemble an actual network. I haven’t seen anyone write about the length of time it takes to build a real network that actually functions. Just remember that as your network grows it helps to drop a message to the people you actually know well to see how they are doing. Maybe you could be in a position to help them out during a tough time or maybe they would be willing to help you. Often it’s not about what your network can do for you, but what you can do for your network.

This is the way (I couldn’t resist!)

Tony

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Hey There,

I am back from vacation and I feel somewhat rested. I could use some more time, but I have started a new job. It is kind of a big switch for me so I might update this newsletter a bit less frequently till I am sure I have a good handle on the day to day responsibilities. The thing about new jobs is you are usually ending something to start something new.

I know there is this great big thing called the Great Resignation going on, but I think it is more like the Great Reshuffle. People I know are getting new jobs, sometimes more than one job, and are just generally trying to live their best lives. This might mean moving away from a high cost of living (HCOL) area, going to a competitor, switching fields, or striking out on your own. I have had former co-workers who have quit for a new job—and then did it again. If any sort of maxim is true it is that the only constant is change, but how do you know it is time to quit and get that next role?

For me, as an early career scientist, it is about learning and growth. I think one of the reasons graduate school was fun (it was also stressful) was that I spent a lot of time learning. The time it took me to do the research for a paper to publication went from just over a year to a few months. I would conceive of new or understudied thermosetting polymers, execute on the idea, and publish. It went from being difficult to simple. If you are in your early career and things are easy for you, but you want to keep growing it’s likely time to move on to the next experience unless you want to be a true expert.

Knowing a specialty in which you want to be an expert early on can be beneficial, but it might be a little dangerous. If for instance you decided you wanted to be an expert around enzymatic catalysis or CRISPR right now I’d consider that to be a good idea, but if you wanted to be an expert on thermosetting polymers I’d tell you to think of some back-up plans. Expertise in an area that is already somewhat fully realized (e.g. thermosets) in a commercial aspect means that its going to be somewhat challenging to hit that steep learning curve and that your income might be truly capped as a scientist. Once you are an expert it can be hard to transition away to a different field.

As an early career scientist I think it is best to try a bunch of different things until you think, “I could do this happily at this compensation for the next 20 years.” Maybe this happens early on in your career (congratulations), but for many of us I think a combination of location, learning opportunities, and the needs and wants of our partner (if you are lucky enough to find one) tend to carry us around to a variety of different professional experiences. I view this sampling of experiences every 2-3 years as a benefit.

I believe there is a psychological tax that we pay whenever we quit one role for another. I tend to carry some anxiety leading into the new role that plays on repeat within my own head:

What if I’ve just been lucky this whole time? Maybe this is the role where people will find out that the past 10-12 years of my career I’ve just gotten wildly lucky. My success isn’t due to my abilities, but rather due to forces outside of my control. I need to work incredibly hard just to catch up to my peers in this new organization. I need to figure out the prescribed hierarchy and the true hierarchy. I need to build social capital with my coworkers immediately. I need to gain their trust. I hope I don’t suck at this. Should I have just stayed where I was comfortable?

For me, running through this dialog every 2-3 years is incredibly difficult and mentally draining for the first six months. When this publishes I will also have started in a new role myself so that internal dialog will be actively playing in my head. Actually, it has already started. I might publish a bit less regularly because of it.

Some of you reached out when I was writing about burn out before I went on vacation. I don’t think I’m burned out or maybe I was approaching it in my old role, but once again I think it’s valuable to see recognize some of the signs, root causes, and then try and organize your life around not burning out. This book and article from Anne Helen Peterson might help you figure it out for yourself. For me, it was a combination of broken business processes, a sense of precarity in my role, and a lack of coworkers able to handle the workload. I am hoping this new role is one where I can stay for a long time and get a chance to learn. I’d like to be “from somewhere” and I hope this is it!

I am approaching the end of my early career, which I define as 15 years post undergraduate degree, and I’m going to have to figure out what it means to be a mid-career scientist. I’m hoping in the next year or two I will really understand what it means to be an early career scientist so I can write a book proposal and send it off to a few publishers.

If you were an early subscriber to this newsletter you might know exactly who I am. If you are new here it might be hard to figure out and this is by design. I never actually thought I’d make it this long writing this newsletter or that I’d be reaching as many people as I am, but I am attempting to step back into being somewhat anonymous. It feels somewhat safer even though I will be writing as if everyone I know reads every thing I write and judges who I am on my writing. It’s a nice way to be held accountable. There is a fine line of being a crazy person in your basement writing on the internet in your underwear and a respectable writer.

Thanks for being here,

Tony

And you are reading it.

My actual day to day job is often difficult but for the wrong reasons. From a technical perspective it’s actually quite easy, but from a business process standpoint it’s maddening. I often hear of brilliant technical people floundering in business environments because the processes to get things done are broken or the processes were put in place with 30% more people and due to recent budget cuts during the pandemic those processes are now broken. The longer you survive in a business environment the more afraid you are of getting laid off. This means the longer you are someplace I think the job becomes a mixture of a job and the show survivor. You want to look good.

The issue with looking good is that we tend to focus on appearances instead of actually being good at the job or role we occupy. Sometimes, expectations from management or the board of directors are so disconnected with the reality on the ground that looking good is all you can do. Speaking truth to the power that is your executive team or regional management is difficult because I think we equate systemic failures with personal failures. There is also the chance that speaking the truth get’s you put out to pasture sooner too—a veritable Catch-22.

While most people will not speak the truth to their management teams due to fear they often will work very hard to try and achieve what might be impossible goals. I think technical people while in school equated hard work with good results either in the lab or in the classroom. This is because in a classroom there is often a right answer (how else do you get graded) and in a research lab failure is also progress. The thinking is often that if you fail enough you will eventually find the reaction conditions, the right purification, or the right test method and you will get what you need. In academia not hitting your goals might mean expulsion in graduate school or just varying degrees of failure as defined by either the institution or yourself. People do not seek failure in school or career.

From Kindergarten to Doctorate this concept of success through hard work is hammered into us. I think this mentality often leads to management teams putting very difficult expectations on their employees year after year and employees getting very close or achieving those expectations year after year. Often we get a big carrot dangled in front of us and it’s often just out of our reach. I suspect the people who deal in bits instead of atoms often get their carrots, but there are always more and they never quite fill you up. Eventually, some employees get exhausted, even after two years of employment and they start looking around at what else is out there. Why not get a 10-20% raise for doing the same thing somewhere else or maybe even a pay cut to just have less stress in your job? Hello “Great Resignation,” which just appears to be people getting better jobs as far as I can tell.

I think in the business world there is actually benefit to having a clear dialog that is open and honest. Knowing what goals are stretches versus achievable is a business that truly knows its own business. This is rare in my experience. Managers that understand mitigation of risk and knowing why projects might not deliver on time and communicating these risks early and often to executive teams know their business and their teams. If you want a high performance business delivering above market returns on invested capital you need trust that runs vertically through the organization and you need people that know their business very well. Having people that know the business at all levels very well is worth paying a premium. 

A company’s board of directors is willing to pay executives top dollar for their talents, but will often fight on increasing hourly employee wages or low level professionals. In this dramatization of Lehman Brothers before they go bankrupt the CEO says his job is to tell when the “music stops.” Spoiler alert: the real Lehman Brothers goes out of business and Fuld (in the movie his name is Fuld) goes down with the ship.

Further, in the face of reduced revenue or rising raw material costs employees are often seen as a cost center to be cut. To those employees who remain, their jobs often become more difficult, fear is obliquely used as a motivator (intent is moot here) as in “if you do not perform you will be asked to leave,” and eventually the business start to erode. The precarity of our economy means you either move on before you are asked to leave, you eventually get asked to leave, or you become a large enough shareholder of the business that you are in the Catch-22 situation. The longer you are in the chemical industry the more you see this occur every few years.

This cycle appears, at least to me, to spiral downwards. Teams always tend to get smaller. That team you were working with and making progress with a specific site gets dissolved and you are now working directly with operators who have been told to work mandatory overtime. A team of 4 gets reduced to a team of 1 with similar expectations on delivering certain projects or goals. A team member decides to leave in the middle of her project failing and you are now tasked with getting it to work in an extremely short amount of time, and your failure is communicated upwards. Success just means you get a wage increase that is less than current inflation and a $50 Amazon gift card (if you are lucky).

My intent isn’t to be all doom and gloom here, but rather to help you recognize situations that might lead to you burning out. Think about your worst case scenario coming true and then plan for it to happen. If you truly burnt a four week vacation will not cure you of your ailment. If your worst case scenario is getting laid off then you aren’t being imaginative enough. Let me give you my current scenario:

I wake up and I’m 50 doing roughly the same job I was doing in my mid 30s to early 40s and my salary has barely kept up with inflation. I’m still dealing with chemicals not getting inventoried properly and discussing the same safety issues that appear to never get fixed. My sales team is never able to actually sell any technically successful projects or the team that said they could sell it have moved on to other companies either voluntarily or involuntarily. If I were to get laid off here I’ll have to move my family to the next opportunity, likely in another state, or I’ll be the one who has to get a temporary apartment near my new job and live a sort of dual life. I’m counting the days till I can retire (hint: I still have 10-15 years to go).

My scenario on the whole isn’t that bad because most of my essential needs are met, but rather it’s pernicious due to it representing my own personal hell loop. Perhaps this is why I am writing this newsletter. I suspect my efforts here might have a higher probability of influencing change than my own individual efforts within an organization in the chemical industry. There are already 1040+ people receiving emails here every week and I’ve gotten some messages from readers that 100% confirm some of my suspicions. 

I often write about how chemical companies of the future can be different technically, but I think there is plenty of room to change how these companies are run too. If we want to see a sustainable future where we mitigate climate change to happen we need to have teams capable of achieving what sounds impossible and we only get there by fighting the conditions that set us up for burnout.

I hope you get a chance to get some rest this year.

Tony

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a scientist today in 2022 and what it might mean to be a scientist in 10 years in 2032 and what it meant to be a scientist 10 years ago in 2012. I think as humans we are unreliable in forecasting out ten years, much less thirty years into the future, but I think we are good at looking into the past. We know what the jobs of scientists were ten years ago or longer because people lived through those times and can speak to those experiences. 

So how should we think about predicting the future for being a scientist, especially if we want to have a career as a scientist for about 45 years?

As a polymer chemist looking back to when I was synthesizing polymers in 2009-2012 I think I saw the role of a scientist as being very lab dependent. At the time I saw a fundamental problem between where we got our polymers (oil) and how we disposed of them (mostly landfills). At the time I predicted the future would be in sustainability and I thought Cradle To Cradle was amazing so when I was aiming for graduate school my values centered on sustainable polymer chemistry. For the most part I think I was right, but when it was time to get a job in the chemical industry there were not a lot of positions available.

In immortal words of Chemjobber: 

What's the job market like for chemists? Dude -- it's always bad.*

(*For the literal-minded, this is a joke. Mostly.)

This is why a significant portion of this newsletter is dedicated to being a career scientist and why I love having sponsors post jobs in this newsletter and why I try to actively post #chemjobs on Twitter (@tpolymerist). My own frustration in part is also why I try to understand for myself what exactly is happening in the chemical industry. The direction of the business dictates the human capital requirements. 

When I started writing this newsletter I felt that the chemical industry was at a tipping point or a precipice. Either things would fundamentally change from a shareholder and management perspective or hungry venture capitalists and start-up founders would seek to disrupt a highly regulated and capital intensive industry. I think we are seeing both happen at the same time.

Bifurcation - The Haves and Have Nots

From what I can tell in my own reading and experiences the chemical industry tends to bifurcate into the “haves” and “have nots.” The “haves” are typically large, well capitalized, and very profitable (EBITDA ~ 19% or higher) and can afford to invest in long term R&D that will provide long term growth and value. These companies can walk and chew gum at the same time because not only can they invest to hit the homeruns, but they can also do incremental innovation to stay in leadership positions in their current products and end markets. The “haves” are playing the short term zero sum game of right now and the long term game of true wealth creation. They are just very selective in what home runs they want to try and hit.

The “have nots” are often less profitable (EBITA ~18% or less) and they are playing a zero sum game. For the “have nots” to win additional market share someone else typically has to lose that market share. The “have nots” are focused on cost and maintaining their profitability at all costs. Everyone is expendable to a “have not,” including the executive team. These are the situations where you might have one scientist doing product development and supporting a $100 million revenue business. Typically, these are the types of scientists that have an ever expanding job description and they might find themselves writing technical marketing material. The “have nots” are trying to keep the boat afloat a little bit longer, usually until they get acquired. If it feels unsustainable to work at a place like this then trust your instincts. 

I’m not alone in this opinion. The Accenture Chemicals Practice has also come to a similar conclusion: 

Today, in-house research and development (R&D) is focused largely on incremental improvements to the properties of existing materials. Innovation in chemical processes to reduce GHG emissions, for example, is trailing material-related innovation significantly. For chemical companies, basic and applied research typically represent higher risk and longer-term payouts, while incremental developments that focus largely on modifying existing products tend to offer faster, more certain returns—and are seen as the “safer bet.” 

In the United States, that attitude is reflected in a 9 percentage-point decline in the basic and applied research share of the industry’s total R&D expenditures between 1990 and 2020, in favor of incremental development.2

The lack of investment into innovation is a definite sign that capital managers aren’t really sure what to do because their thinking is often on too short of a time scale. When I write “investors” I mean current shareholders of the chemical industry. There are plenty of venture investors looking to take a piece of a chemical industry pie and they want to make a boatload of money while also in theory trying to do fundamental good in the world. If chemical industry shareholders want to see industry disruptive EBITDA percentages in their companies they need to fund the development and products to get there. If investing 2-3% of revenue into R&D is keeping the boat from sinking then above 4% should be considered the minimum for meaningful long term growth.

If you have no idea what “home runs” mean or what incremental innovation means I’ve written about it in-depth here. Essentially, the modern chemical industry is built on huge innovations that happened early to mid twentieth century such as inventing Nylon or Epoxy Resin and it has become more difficult to find those types of home runs and bring them to market. There are numerous reasons for this such as The Nylon Problem which Jon Siddall talks about at length in the ACS Industry Matters: 

The issue we face in mature industries like the chemical industry is that we are capability rich and target poor. There is a material solution for almost all large applications. We can make almost any molecule you can draw – for a price. Please don’t misunderstand - it is certainly not time to close the patent office! What we need is new applications for materials and not so much new materials for existing applications. Because of this maturity, the opportunities to make truly new materials are less at this point in history. There is a simple reason for this, and it is due, to all things, a simple dimensional analysis or the Square-Cube law. This makes large scale processes win every time and in turn limits materials innovation.

Equipment that can process 100 times as much material usually is only around 100^0.6 or 16 times as much cost to build. A new material is made on a small scale and cannot compete with a large-scale incumbent on price. With each advance in materials, it is more difficult for the next generation of materials to be enough more valuable to overcome this cost disadvantage. I have worked on materials that are superior in many ways to what you use today, but they cannot grow commercially for this reason. It’s not a technical problem as much as a business problem. And today’s materials are mostly “good enough” When’s the last time a plastic object unexpectedly let you down? Globalization makes this even more daunting since production of existing materials moves to low cost places, making them even harder to displace.

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Finding New Targets

If we think about targets for chemical companies they should ideally be high growth areas where there is not a lot of competition. In the last 5-10 years there has been a phenomenal amount of investment and interest in chemical recycling of plastics and I suspect there will be even more in the coming years. Eastman is investing over a billion dollars and Indorama Ventures is investing 8 billion dollars into recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET). Dow, Exxon, and Shell are all investing and looking into other ways to make ethylene and propylene and pyrolysis oil from plastic waste is a key strategy. 

Sometimes finding a new target might be as simple as helping other companies get down the cost curve with known, but expensive materials. Apogee for instance is trying to bring composite manufacturing down the cost curve, which could have second order effects around making lightweight formula 1 level composites accessible to more people. Evonik spent 10 years developing their expertise around fermenting biosurfactants and it’s of significant interest among the personal care product developers. Costs and performance for the fermented and compostable plastics family of polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) have been a difficult road for many, but Danimer is attempting to do it at scale and Bioextrax is trying to help similar companies bring new fermented compostable polymers to market by improving downstream processing. A target worth billions doesn’t necessarily have to be around solving some critical problem that is widely known to the public. 

In the chemical industry we tend to think about going after someone else’s market as opposed to creating a completely new one. There are new markets to that company, but they are markets that currently exist and there are new markets that are just waiting to be created.

Here is a list of some problems I’ve been thinking about in chemicals and I think they all have some grounding in climate change. Some are classically old (before climate change was a thing) and by no means is this exhaustive or a non-obvious list. If you know of a company working on bringing a solution to market let me know in the comments. If you’ve got an interesting problem (target) also let me know in the comments.

1. Water purification with low energy inputs to remove things like salt and/or PFAS

2. Non-fossil or food based chemical feedstocks (i.e. biomass)

3. Dual purpose materials such as structural capacitors or anti-corrosive solar paint

4. Easy to recycle electronic materials

5. Low energy input fertilizers either at scale or hyper local

6. On-demand reversible adhesives

The Future of Being A Scientist

I’m a polymer chemist, but if you are a different type of scientist you should have your own list of “big problems” or the sorts of achievements that you know would change your whole end market. These problems are typically really difficult, maybe even impossible, but if you were to solve them you probably know that you could never do it alone and that a team of specialists is a absolute must. I suspect before long a larger portion of scientists will be working for start-ups.

The problem is that I think for the established chemical industry the teams of specialists are slowly becoming more rare, but the place where they appear to be flourishing are start-ups. These start-ups might be doing 3D printing, batteries, biotechnology, carbon nanomaterials, biobased chemicals, or more. The graph above isn’t perfect, but I think it highlights what we might see in the future, and that is a healthy start-up ecosystem trying to disrupt the incumbents.

I also think that money will continue to flow into this sector that many call “deep tech” as digital growth companies continue to go lower in total market capitalization. Digital growth start-ups might be able to solve some of the digital aspects of climate change problems of these deeply technical problems. Maybe a company will figure out a way to sort all of our trash into compostable, recyclable, and landfill streams with robots and Raman spectrometers.

If you a young scientist still in school I think the future is bright and definitely think about the types of problems you want to solve and how profitable it might be to solve those problems. If you are nearing the end of your early career or in the mid or late career stage of being a scientist and you’ve worked in “the industry” then you should be a wealth of knowledge when it comes to product development, commercialization, and getting things done in a corporate setting. For a start-up to get an experienced scientist that knows how to set-up a lab and how to build a product development team this experience will become very valuable.

I think the future looks bright. We just need to build it now.

Tony

If you haven’t noticed I’ve split the newsletter into three different categories. This category of the newsletter is focused on what it means to be a career scientist and I’m drawing from my own experiences, stories people tell me, and questions I’m interested in answering. I’m nearly at the end of being an early career scientist and I’m trying to ask the question, “what’s next?” If you think a collection of this writing together would be worth paying for perhaps I’ll turn it into a book—let me know.

In my time as an early career scientist I’ve been fortunate enough to work as an industry scientist with and without a PhD and in my limited experience I’ve also gotten to experience start-ups, medium to large chemical companies, and even a family run business. In all of this time I’ve been working within the function of “research and development,” or “product development,” or “innovation.” All of these things are essentially the same it just really revolves around what model of product development the company you are working for decides to implement.

Model 1 - Team Of Specialists

The first model is something that I think we can all relate to through popular culture. It’s the model of the scientists are in the lab wearing lab coats doing experiments 75% of the day. Think of the popular depictions of scientists in movies and TV shows wearing white lab coats (no stains) talking to each other in laboratory settings. While these depictions I believe are usually not realistic they do capture this sense of a lot of working being done in a laboratory by scientists.

The first model is really focused on the scientists being in the lab. This is what I got to experience when I was working in a start-up company. I spent the majority of my time in the lab shoulder to shoulder with the PhD level scientists. If I was at my computer I spent my time in excel crunching data or coming up with new experiments to try. I remember at one point being surrounded by petroleum ether in a hood trying to isolate a specific pre-polymer and the founder walks in the lab and said something along the lines of, “you really look like you are busy Tony.”

I hear of this model outside of the start-up world really being implemented in the much larger centralized R&D functions of large companies at places such as Dow or Henkel. The scientists are often focused on doing good science and spending their time getting results. This model requires the other functions such as marketing, sales, and EH&S to be very good at their jobs. Further, in my experience and in the experience of others that I’ve spoken to this model of R&D does not interface often with the other functions in the company.

When To Use Model 1

Often, these R&D teams are comprised of specialists within their skillset. You might have a synthetic polymer chemist working with an analytical chemist and a polymer physicist to figure out something fundamental with reactive extrusion. You might group a metabolic engineer with a downstream process engineer and an analytical scientist if you are doing strain development to ferment a high value target molecule. All of these teams are comprised of true specialists and they are often supported by a lot of technicians handling routine and “known” work.

A core tenant to this model is that the company has the money to hire true specialists to collaborate and figure out very challenging problems worth a lot of money. If you want to bring something industry changing or world changing then Model 1 is perfect. If you are a start-up trying to bring a completely new technology into the world then Model 1 will likely get you 85-95% of the way there. If you are stuck on a problem such your initial product fails in some spectacular way that you don’t want it to and you need to fix it then Model 1 is the way I would advise you to go.

If none of the scenarios above sound like your company or what you want to do with your life long term then consider Model 2.

Model 2 - Jack Of All Trades

Post PhD, I’ve gotten to experience what I call Model 2. We can think of this model of R&D as the expanding job. Anne Helen Peterson describes this succinctly in The Expanding Job:

In many organizations, particularly anywhere where a consultant has been called in to “trim the fat,” the jobs that ensured that work was performed smoothly and without overload have been eliminated, the essential components of their job descriptions added onto those that remained. To look back at the last forty years of corporate layoffs is to watch so many employers forget — or be convinced to forget — that fat has an essential purpose.

The passage above in particular made me reflect about my own current and past jobs. How it has often expanded to fill the voids of the people that used to work with me. I’m no novice when it comes to layoffs and this shit happens to people in the chemical industry all the time. I don’t think anyone in a chemical company is “safe,” from being trimmed or asked to leave and this includes executive leadership and the board of directors.

A comment on my own post by a reader when I was writing about how the chemical industry is trying to rebrand itself also struck me as very accurate:

You may consider drawing parallels between the Chemical Industry and the Auto Industry...Old commodity, no place to go but cut to the bone or rebrand into "solutions"

We can think of Model 2 for R&D being minimal staff supporting existing business while maybe figuring out something incremental in their spare time. The best mass media equivalent I can think of here is how we meet Scotty in the rebooted Chris Pine Star Treks:

Essentially, a talented engineer with one buddy out on some remote ice station doing routine work with minimal to no support. Sure, this is an over exaggeration, but I think it speaks to what is asked of scientists and engineers now at mature chemical companies. Do more with less.

As companies are pushed to bring value to shareholders short term this means that they have to keep delivering profitable growth despite competition from new entrants into the markets, cheaper substitutes, supply chain disruptions, and more innovative companies (essentially all of Porter’s five forces). As opposed to reinvesting profits, which might not have a clear and measurable return, mature companies tend to cut costs or “trim the fat.”

As costs go down and profits marginally go up the remaining employees, especially in the product focused groups, tend to bear larger burdens. I remember one R&D director I used to work for wanted all of the chemists that reported up through him to be cross-trained on each others work and to have both “innovation” and “technical service” projects so that it was hard to justify trimming anyone on the team.

Working in this sort of “expanding role” means that you get to do a lot of different things that is typically reserved for the other roles such as product management, marketing, EH&S, supply chain, procurement, engineering, and more. The reason you are doing the other function’s jobs is often because there are not enough people in those functions to do everything that needs to get done.

Eventually, you might find yourself as the lone scientist or R&D person supporting $70 million dollars in revenue while also being expected to come up with the “next best thing” to beat out your competition. When these people leave they are often impossible to replace because of their both broad and deep domain expertise. You can’t just go out to the job market and say, “give me an expert in XYZ that is willing to accept average pay to do a very difficult job.”

These two models are definitely extremes, but I guess I’ve had more experience with being closer to Model 2 as opposed to Model 1. Where on the spectrum between these two models is your current company?

Tony

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Early Career Scientist

Two Extreme Models Of R&D

A bunch of people are going to be graduating from their undergraduate and graduate programs in a few months and the number one thing people are interested in right now is getting a job. I remember when I was doing my own PhD (~6 years ago since I finished) I was actually mostly finished in three years. I just spent the last year trying to figure out how to get a job, “writing” my thesis, and “collaborating.”

This email is what I wish I had 7 years ago and I wrote this back in January 2020. To those who are graduating this spring or know someone who is congratulations. Welcome to the working world. I’ll try and publish updated versions of this once a year in the winter/spring months.

This was originally published in January of 2021 in The Polymerist newsletter.

1. Getting The Interviews

Landing the interview and getting to the next interview in the process is step 1. For those with a bachelors degree sometimes that first interview is the only interview you need to ace. For those with a higher degree you might have to go through a more lengthy interview process that consists of multiple calls, a technical presentation, and more 1-on-1 interviews with future team members or directors. I present my own stories here on how applying to jobs, attending conferences, networking on LinkedIn, and following up on opportunities will land you an interview.

An additional thought I’m having in 2022 is that if location doesn’t matter to you then sometimes going to more rural areas can be an advantage. Everyone wants to be in the major coastal cities, but sometimes small towns in Ohio or Indiana can play to your advantage if you are willing to relocate there for a few years.

Step 1: Apply to Jobs. You get rejected from 100% of the jobs where you didn’t apply.

My first job with a BS in Chemistry actually came from Craigslist during the depths of the Great Recession in 2009. I was doing research in Andrei Vedernikov’s Group, but I was not going to be a graduate student. I essentially had the summer to find a job while I worked in the lab doing research and I was renting a room as a boarder in a local family’s house for $300/month. This was a really stressful time. I had started to lose hope because I had been applying to jobs since late 2008, but there was a massive recession going on, the biggest since the Great Depression (sound familiar?).

It’s not that I was lazy in my undergraduate studies. I had worked an internship with the Smithsonian in Art Conservation for about 2 years and I had published a paper during my time there. I remember the director of the Museum Conversation Institute telling me that he would have offered me a job there, but the recession had forced massive cutbacks on the budget and the role they wanted to hire me for would not be available.

That sent me to do research with Andrei Vedernikov, where I published another paper with a graduate student Julia Khusnutdinova (now Professor Khusnutdinova) and I even got turned down to be a graduate student at the University of Maryland, my Alma Mater). In full disclosure, I was not ready and in hindsight doing a PhD at that time would have been disastrous.

This all led me to that temporary research position with Professor Vedernikov and me applying to jobs on every jobsite I could find including Craigslist in the DC area while I was doing experiments in the lab and scrounging whatever coffee and free food I could find. My morale was low and I was almost resigned to giving up, but I eventually got an interview and I got my first job where I made a grand total of $42,000 as my starting salary in 2009

Step 2: Go to Conferences and Career Fairs If You Can

My second professional job would come to me in the final months of graduate school. My PhD groupmate, collaborator, and peer mentor at the time had gotten an interview and turned down a job at Hexion in Louisville, Kentucky. I figured I had a shot, so I applied, got a screening phone interview, and then I got ghosted. I tried following up, I tried calling the HR person back, but I heard nothing until I was about to go to an American Chemical Society Conference in San Diego. I was told the job was canceled as I was getting onto a plane.

ACS typically has a career fair, but that year it was pretty dismal. There were only 2 companies that were hiring where I might be a fit and both dealt with the same sort of chemistry—phenolic resins. The first was Georgia Pacific and the role was being a chemist that would travel between different plants solving technical problems with different products. The second was the job I had applied to at Hexion where they ghosted me! Apparently it wasn’t canceled after all.

I actually got in person interviews for both jobs at the career fair and I was able to land the deciding interview at Hexion, which at the time was a technical on-site interview that lasted a whole day. I would get turned down by Georgia Pacific for the job I wanted and I turned them down for an industrial post-doc role where they wanted to hire me (my instincts there were good since I would be on the other side of the table from someone I had met while interviewing a year later).

Hexion on the other hand asked me how soon I could get on a plane to Kentucky and by the next week I was presenting in a conference room on a Thursday. By the next Monday I had an offer.

Step 3: Network and Use Recruiters

The next job I got after Hexion came to me through LinkedIn. I had been actively looking because my fiancée and I (we are now married) didn’t want to live in Kentucky our whole lives and my fiancée wanted to have more options for nursing graduate school. There are tons of recruiters who specialize in recruiting for the chemical industry on LinkedIn. Go find them, connect with them, and tell them about yourself.

Are you unsure about a market sector in the chemical industry? Go find 10 people in that industry, ask them to connect to you, and talk to them. There has never been a better time to be a person looking for a job with the tools we have available to us.

Getting interviews with recruiters is easier than cold applying because they also sort of act the way a company’s HR system would in screening you. The best parts are that recruiters often work on multiple roles and you can have multiple recruiters working with you on multiple jobs and there is a higher chance your resume is getting past whatever applicant tracking system companies might use for their online job applications.

Remember that recruiters make money when they get their candidate to fill the position. You do not pay recruiters.

If you are a industrial chemist I’d recommend using Stephanie Kemp at CPS, a firm that specializes in chemical industry recruitment. If there are any other chemical industry specific recruiters here reading this respond in the comments with your LinkedIn profile.

Step 4: Follow Up. Always.

My fourth (third post PhD) and current job I got by following up. I was unhappy/bored at the job I got through the recruiter after about year so I started applying online again. I was trying to be focused on the DC area because that is where my family and my wife’s family are located. We also didn’t like Nashua, NH very much despite loving northern New Hampshire and the neighborhoods closer to Boston.

I applied to a job at what I thought at the time was W.R. Grace, but was actually the spun off construction products business of W.R. Grace under the new name of GCP Applied Technologies. I applied thinking that I was going for a job in Columbia, Maryland, but in actuality the job was located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My resume even said that I was looking for jobs in the DC/Baltimore area.

Around August 26th I got an email from the company’s talent acquisition recruiter and she asked me if I was interested in the job because it was located in Cambridge—not Maryland. I then realized my mistake and confessed and asked if it was possible to transfer to Columbia, Maryland later. It was not, but I wasn’t fully against working in Cambridge either. I was also interested in the market space of construction products so working in Cambridge in a market I was interested in would be most of what my wife and I wanted (she would also be closer to potential schools).

So I had a call with the recruiter and I bowed out of the job because we were getting ready for our wedding in October, but I made sure to keep the door open to this job in Cambridge. A few weeks later I followed up and I was getting questioned if I was serious about wanting to be in the area and I was then also told a few people were going in for final interviews and that they would reach out if they needed me. I felt bummed I had missed my chance, but final interviews do not mean taken offers.

A few weeks after that I followed up again to see if those final interviews had turned into job offers. Those interviewees didn’t pan out and after talking about compensation and availability I had a phone interview set-up for the next week. After the phone interview I had an on-site interview scheduled for half a day a few days after my wedding.

In total between applying and actually getting the on-site interview it took about 2 months and you could argue I did not present myself as the best candidate at the start. I like to believe my technical ability and my willingness to follow-up on things actually got me the interview and the eventual offer.

2. Getting the Offers.

The second step to getting a job after you land the interview is getting the offer. You typically get the offer by being amazing during the interview followed by a few other small, but critical things. The four stories above are about me getting the interview and the next are about some key things you need to do to try and convert those interviews into solid offers.

Step 1. Be accountable for everything on your resume

The first job I got after my undergraduate degree where I applied to the job via Craigslist was in part based on me knowing everything on my resume. I was interviewing with a bunch of PhD chemists so they all knew more about chemistry than I did, but my resume told a story of research excellence. When they asked questions about my research I was able to talk at length and in-depth and I think I even started to ramble at times. I felt comfortable drawing structures on a white board and showing reaction mechanisms. There was nothing on my resume I couldn’t talk about at length from memory with considerable depth.

The interviewers might know more about chemistry than you, but you are the author and expert of your resume.

Step 2. If you are giving a presentation be prepared to answer all questions. Even the ridiculous ones.

Typically during a technical presentation for a PhD level job you will get questions from the audience who also likely have PhDs and more experience. Be prepared to get interrupted to answer questions that might be asked in a straightforward manner, maybe even bordering on rude.

In every technical presentation I’ve given I have had to answer questions from the audience. In crafting your presentation you should know many of the logical questions. If you are really good you can lead the audience with what questions you want them to ask and have the answer on the next slide.

Sometimes you get asked ridiculous questions that have no bearing on what you are presenting about. This might happen during the presentation or it might happen during 1-on-1 interviews with team members or non-team members. An example might be:

What is the density of water in lbs/gallons?

You talked about viscosity on your last slide. Explain to me what viscosity is from a fundamental point of view.

Can you give me the total synthesis of methyl methacrylate from crude oil?

An example I can give was I presenting on adhesives and my work as an industrial chemist that was a bit vague due to intellectual property reasons. I was asked to draw structures and show mechanisms of how reactions progressed. I drew mechanisms of how amino and phenolic resins are made. I drew mechanisms on polyurethanes. I drew mechanisms on anionic polymerizations.

In my 1-on-1 with a technical fellow he told me that my presentation was not very good and that I should have presented my doctoral work because that represents my true ability as a scientist. I then proceeded to spend the next 30 minutes walking him through my thesis work with reaction mechanisms on a white board from memory.

It felt a bit unfair to me to do this because I knew my PhD thesis like no other. Maybe that was the point—if you cannot talk about your PhD work in detail 5-10 years after you have finished it then maybe you didn’t do a very good job at understanding what you did.

Step 3. Be prepared for the worst case scenario

I was in Edmonton, Canada working with a different division on a project when they were interviewing people for a job. The manager of the group asked me to interview candidates at the hotel bar where I was staying in an informal manner and he also asked me to really figure out if they knew their stuff. The role was essentially a leadership chemist position where multiple chemists would report to this person and this person needed to know synthetic polymer chemistry, specifically phenolic resin chemistry.

So the candidate thinks they are meeting me for a beer in the hotel bar to talk about the company, what it is like to work as chemist, or talk about company culture, but in reality it is a highly technical interview done on bar napkins. I started by drawing structures on bar napkins and asking the candidates about how incorporating those molecules into a phenolic resin might influence their properties.

To be clear I wasn’t looking for a right or wrong answer I just wanted to see how they would reason through a somewhat basic question that would be common to the job.

The first guy I interviewed started physically sweating as soon as I asked questions. He danced around the question and tried to answer with a non-answer, but when I pressed him he couldn’t give me an answer. The second guy I interviewed the next night actually was able to reason his way through the questions despite him not knowing phenolic resins at all. The second guy got the job and has been promoted a few times already.

The wort case scenario here if you didn’t catch it was being ambushed in a hotel bar with chemical structures drawn on bar napkins. While you yourself might not be a synthetic chemist there are probably similar scenarios where you need to be prepared to talk chemistry, physics, chemical engineering, or all the above in a non-traditional setting. Even getting a ride to the airport so you can catch the red-eye back to New York can be an interview.

Step 4. Ask leading questions where you have anecdotes that show you ideal for the role

An interview is a two way street, which makes it feel less like an interrogation. Some of my favorite questions to ask are the following:

What are some attributes that you need to be successful in this job?

What is it like working here and how is it different than your previous jobs?

Do you have to wear a lot of different hats here, do you work cross-functionally, or do you get to just be in the lab?

The first question allows the interviewer to give you an attribute to expand on at length. An example I have was my second job after my PhD. The interviewer told me I would have to wear a lot of different hats, I might be talking to a customer in the morning followed up working with operators in the plant just after lunch followed by running some experiments later in the day. This gave me a chance to explain how my previous experience made me an excellent candidate for the job because I had done all of things already.

The second question is more about building a rapport with the interviewer. They might talk about how working with John Smith is really difficult and that the business is in flux, and things are sort of stable, but there have been a lot of departures lately. If you hear things like that you might want to consider not working there, but if you are desperate as most people are then you might be able to talk about how you do well in ambiguous environments and how you were able to work well with someone that was difficult in your last role.

The third question really gets into what role you want to have in the future. If you just want to be the person who is very technical and maintain an individual contributor role then working in a position that requires you to just be in the lab might be ideal. If you want to branch off into sales or marketing or a regulatory role later in your career then something where you perform different functions or where you can work with other business functions is important. Depending on the interviewer’s answer you should be able to provide a good example of how you work really well in whatever situation they are describing and if you can’t it might be a good idea to consider that the role isn’t right for you.

Step 5. Do your homework

Read the interviewers’ LinkedIn profiles. Learn about the products the company makes. Ask recruiters what they think of the people interviewing you.

I once interviewed for a temporary federal government job over the phone (that was the technical interview). Prior to the interview I had a list of everyone I would be talking to and I spent about an hour or two looking these people up on LinkedIn, reading some of their published papers, looking at their Facebook and Twitter profiles, and trying to get as much information about them as possible.

When it came time for me to ask them questions I was able to use parts of their history to influence my questions and one of them remarked:

Wow, you really did your homework here

I got an offer, but I didn’t take it due to it being very temporary with no chance of turning into a permanent position.

Put in a solid 1-2 hours before your interview looking up the people or the company and you’ve got a good shot at getting an offer. An interview is an opportunity to show someone how you are unique and will bring immense value to an organization.

Before the interview for my current job I talked to a local recruiter who knew the people I would be talking to and he was able to give me a rundown on some of their attributes and what they might be looking for at the company. This 30 minute talk with a recruiter not only provided me with additional information before heading to the interview, but it also helped create a relationship with that recruiter who might be someone I would need in the next five years.

Not that I want to leave me job in the next 5 years, but pandemics happen, layoffs happen, parents gets sick, people die, your priorities might change drastically in the next year. They probably changed this year. Put yourself in a position to get as many opportunities as possible.

Step 6. Be polite. Send thank you emails. Follow-up with any additional questions.

Whenever you interview somewhere usually the people talking to you give you their card or give you a way of contacting them. It only seems polite to just reach out, thank them, and maybe ask a follow-up question or provide some additional color on a question that they asked that you might have fumbled.

That job I got from Craigslist I actually did fumble a question a bit and I was beating myself up about it. I really needed the job, so I crafted an email directly to the person who asked it of me, wrote a better answer than I gave, and then I thanked her for her time and the thoughtful questions. I also emailed my interviewers and thanked them for the opportunity and their time. After I got the job and started working there the woman who I had emailed my follow-up answer to told me that in her over twenty year career no one had ever followed up like that in an email. She told me that email had her argue passionately in my favor.

It took me five minutes to write that email.

Being polite is free. Thanking someone is free. Following up is free.

Small But Critical Components

The other things that I didn’t talk about that are critical for getting an offer would be you need to have good references. Your thesis adviser, some professors your worked with, old coworkers, or current coworkers are people who will vouch for you. If you are someone that is difficult to work and you don’t have good relationships with people your life will be more difficult.

If you want to be a professional you should be able to give someone an honest reference if needed and put your personal differences aside. It doesn’t have to be a positive reference either so as someone who is looking to gain references you should be careful about who you select.

You should not lie on your resume about jobs because companies run background checks. If you said you worked at XYZ and there is no proof that you ever worked there then that is a red flag. Sometimes this happens if you are an unpaid intern or you are working for free to develop skills and then this is when a reference with someone who did work there is critical.

Do not self sabotage yourself by talking bad about your current employer or previous employers. Do not get a job offer and then proceed to get arrested or do a bunch of drugs and then fail the drug screening or criminal background check. It sounds obvious, but you would be surprised about some stories I’ve heard.

I hope you get the offer you want.

Tony

Apparently there are 5 Tuesdays in March and I’m out of things to write about this month based on the structure I’ve been operating on since late last year. I find that structure really helps me hone in on specific topics. I think about this stuff when I’m not writing and the cycle keeps me honest and interested. Perhaps this is how I’ve been able to keep this up for so long, but I realized that with over a year of consistent writing and publishing I’m actually building out quite a bit of written work. It feels good when I write it, but maybe not as useful as a scattered collection in this newsletter.

This issue of the newsletter is sponsored by:

I started this newsletter from a desire to produce what I wish existed when I was working on my undergraduate degree, when I was working with a BS in chemistry, when I was in graduate school, and when I entered the chemical industry with my PhD. I’m trying to show the importance of the chemical and polymer industries to the world, but I also want to try and offer-up what I’ve learned so far to everyone that reads this and who might eventually want it as they progress through their own careers.

I know chemists and scientists have existed in the chemical industry way before I did and I want to know their best practices, tips, and thoughts on how the industry is changing. Where is it headed? What’s the future of being a chemist? (Hint: It’s going to be pretty much the same, maybe more computer help).

Early Career Scientist

I’ve been thinking and writing about my own career and I’ve been interviewing others about their careers. This has made me think about how much more time I’ll be working in my own career. I’m 34 now (35 in November) and if I work till I’m 65 (I hope I don’t have to, but that I want to) I’ve got about 31 years left. If we think about our “careers” starting when we are about 21 and working till we are 65 then it’s a total of about 44 years and if we divide by three it’s split up into ~14 year segments. I’m essentially in year 14 now and I get a sense that I’m starting to exit my early career phase and enter my mid-career phase. 

When it comes to being an early career scientist I think I have a somewhat good idea of how to succeed and the options that are typically available. I’ve worked 4 different jobs (1 pre-PhD, 3 post-PhD) since I was 21. I’ve developed products in medical devices, industrial polymers, consumer apparel, and construction products. I’ve worked with chemical operators at 4 AM on scale-ups. I’ve been in south east Asia looking at how an adhesive is applied to a shoe outsole and I’ve been out at job sites witnessing how construction products get used.

I’ve also been writing about product development as I’ve experienced it as a polymer chemist, but I think there are some similarities across industries. What works in one end market likely works in another and the problems of one company are often the problems in another. Supply chain problems might look different in each market, but a problem being experienced in the oil and gas sector eventually makes its way through the supply chain. Six Sigma might be annoying now, but when all hell breaks loose it’s a life raft you can cling to and the tools and principles can help you find your way to shore.

Being an early career scientist is definitely involves being a good scientist, but it’s maybe only 20-30% of your actual day job (at least in my experience).

Who Do I Look To For Help?

As I start to enter the mid-career phase of being a scientist I think, “who can I read to help me out here?” So far, I think the only relevant resource that is essentially public is Chemjobber. I’ve also had the benefit of being able to talk to some amazing coworkers who offer up a lot of great advice that just lives in my head and perhaps makes its way out in this newsletter, but it’s typically not intentional. 

If I just Google: “early career scientist” and “book” and/or “resource” I get websites and books and books about how to be an early career researcher from an academic point of view. The fundamental problem with this is that academia is a very narrow audience. Most of the scientists that hold a bachelor’s, masters, or doctoral degree will not go into academia. Instead, these scientists often venture off into the for-profit industry, non-profit research centers, or do science related work not in a lab. 

The National Science Foundation has some great data on earned doctorates from 1958-2020 in the United States and if we take the summation of the last 14 years (of the data set) we should get an idea of PhD holders in some stage of their early career (perhaps mid-career too), which is about 776,878 people. You do not need a PhD to be a scientist to be “early career,” and the data around BS and MS graduates is more opaque than PhDs. At a minimum let’s say there are over a million early career scientists out there at any given time in the “early career scientist” stage with hundreds of thousands being added every year.

When I was nearing the end of graduate school I really just wanted a good basic guide on how to get a job in the chemical industry, which I eventually wrote. Once you get that elusive industry job, what do you do next? You might find yourself being very capable compared to your coworkers and this can be good, but it may also be a burden. You might also be at a point in your career when you think, where can I go from here? These are just some of the questions I’ve been trying to answer for myself and they are somewhat personal, but I don’t see these questions being asked or answers even being proposed in the current literature about being an early career scientist.

If you’ve got some good resources let me know.

I think I got really lucky with my first job post-PhD and I had some great coworkers who I developed great friendships with and provided different views on similar problems. Some of these coworkers were mid-career or late-career themselves and sometimes a quick 5-10 minute conversation with one of them reaffirms everything I’ve thought. Not everyone gets to have the experiences I’ve had though.

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Book Proposal Idea (Am I Crazy?) - The Ask

Anyway, if you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m trying to get Voice Of The Customer (VoC, not volatile organic compounds) feedback here. If I were to put together a book in the next few years about being an early career scientist would there be an audience that would want to buy it? What would you want to see in this book? Let me know by responding to this email.

The first stage of the process is to write a book proposal and this ask of the audience is part of the process. Any feedback here would be useful for an actual proposal to a real publisher. I don’t want to self publish a book on Amazon and sell it for $5 unless it’s a necessity and I’ve already got the book written. The editing and structuring the book alone would be a nightmare for me and for the readers. 

I don’t want to write a self-help book. The book I would want to read would be somewhere between advice, memoir, and showing what it means to be an early career scientist through my own experiences and interviews with other people. I’m really just frustrated with the fact that there aren’t a lot of resources out there at all for a profession that is based on the first word in STEM.

If we want a significant amount of our population to go into science because as a society we recognize that these people will help enable our future then why is there little to no information about being an actual scientist? The top results around this are in Quora!?

I figure I have 2 more years left for being an early career scientist (by my own definition) because I don’t think you need to have a PhD to be a scientist. Having a PhD is useful, it gives you confidence, but I don’t think it’s a requirement. A roommate of mine once asked me a question as we were about to graduate from the University of Maryland:

Roommate: Why are you so anxious about graduation?

Me: I haven’t found a job yet. I’m not sure what I’m going to do next.

Roommate: So you’re going to have a degree in chemistry right?

Me: Yeah so?

Roommate: You’re going to be a chemist. That’s awesome. I’m going to be an accountant, which is like meh.

So to those of you who are reading this and you are either in school, know someone in school, or are in the early career stage yourself send me your questions, give me your feedback, and other than great high paying jobs let me know what you want out of your career too. Reply to this email or if you are reading this on the website just email me at: polymerist@substack.com

Thank you for reading,

Tony

Last month I wrote about how many of us are so focused on just landing that first job that we don’t really have a plan for what’s next. Sometimes the weight of school (undergraduate or graduate) or a toxic job is so heavy that any port in a storm will do. Just being able to work a 40 hour week and being paid enough money to actually live a somewhat normal life feels like a luxury. Feeling like that job is secure is an even greater luxury. Eventually we recover from our professional traumas and start to wonder.

This issue of The Polymerist is sponsored by:

Where Can I Go From Here?

Right now I essentially have to choose a career path to work towards. I’ve job hopped a few times in the last six years and I’ve gained those bumps in salary with each hop. I’m approaching a point where job hopping and the promise of that pay bump just doesn’t do it for me. Most of my jobs have been the same for the most part, but the end markets are different, and I don’t necessarily have to synthesize my own polymers anymore either. I’m in the market for that elusive powerup.

I think it’s difficult to power-up or level-up your career by changing into it as in being hired as a leader without having already been a leader. Sure, I could make the argument that I’ve managed undergraduate and graduate students, provided mentorship to younger scientists, or managed projects with technicians who might report directly to me, but that’s more managing and not necessarily leading. I’ve seen managers get hired on without any prior experience and I have yet to see them gain the trust of their direct reports, perhaps a tolerance with mild annoyance.

Leadership, at least in the R&D sense, is the one path that seems to be available to me now, but it will likely be years of “performing above my duties’ before I am actually in a position of leadership. In my experience this is normal. Managing “high performers” as I’m told is not as easy as it might seem. From Harvard Business Review: 

One of the hardest things about managing a supremely competent and confident employee is making sure he’s sufficiently challenged in the job. The antidote to this problem is “classic talent development,” Shapiro says. First, “ask your employee, ‘Where do you want to go next, and what experiences do I need to give you to make sure you get there?’”

I was chatting with a former coworker/“leader of a different group” of mine a few days ago and I was lamenting that I have to try and deliver what felt like “The World” within the next few years and that this always “happens to me.” He proposed that perhaps I get myself into these situations by being both talented technically and agreeable to these situations that are stressful. I think he has a point.

I think at heart I’m still an experimentalist. An audacious goal to me sounds more like a complex problem that I could maybe figure out as opposed to something that is “technically impossible.” I want to see if it really is impossible. A professional, “hold my beer” moment.Can I make it to the top of the ladder?

So where do I want my career to go? In conversations with my wife I think we know what we want our best life to be, but it’s mainly a challenge of how do we get there from here?

Perhaps for me, a leadership role is a stepping stone to attaining that lifestyle or maybe being a full time project manager is the better approach? 

Should I go product management into marketing? 

Should I focus on this experiment of a newsletter more?

What else can I do outside of being a technical person?

To me it feels like I’m still at the beginning or maybe at the end of the beginning. Perhaps I’m slowly moving into the second act of my career, but I’m listening to all of my options including the recruiters out there like this month’s sponsor CPS.

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I’m writing from the airport and I’m having trouble thinking about how I might end this and perhaps it’s just difficult because my professional career is still in progress. How do I end an article about something that isn’t finished?

I do want to hear from the audience.

Has anyone else reading this found their professional home or are you still seeking? What worked for you or didn’t work for you. Let me know in the comments if you feel comfortable sharing with everyone or if you just want to tell me and have it filter back out by influencing my writing then reply to this email.

Do you have a non-traditional career that took you from the bench to writing full time or doing public policy or something way out of left field? I want to talk and share your stories here if possible.

I just talked to an old friend from graduate school and he’s making significantly more money than I am, lives near his family, and is dating someone who he really likes. He has been in a new technical role for only a week, but he tells me he could see himself staying there for a long time. I wasn’t necessarily jealous of the money, but rather of the feeling that he told me about. That feeling of finding your professional home. I’m very happy for him and that feeling he is experiencing is something I want us all to experience. Sounds like an audacious goal right?

Hold my beer.

Tony

Hard Wired To Achieve

You might not realize it, but as scientists we are essentially taught to achieve. We design experiments to answer questions or solve problems and then we write papers or patents to communicate and exclude others from practicing that work. For many of us coming out of both undergraduate and graduate programs the idea of getting a job is exciting due to how much more money there is to be made. 

To those who are resistant towards going into industry and who wish to stay in Academia you have an immense amount of respect from me. Federal funding for research always appears to be a shrinking pool of money while costs to do research at universities always appears to be rising. Getting that first job in the industry though is a real challenge and landing one is a real achievement. Kind of like getting to the top of a mountain.

The thing about getting to the top of the mountain is you are often in search of the next peak. I think after a few years of working most of us get kind of myopic about our careers. It’s easy to become focused on hitting that crazy goal to get your bonus or some of us are just trying to survive the current supply chain crisis. 

I think we get trapped by our achievements and our abilities. Eventually, the idea of working on some noble mission evaporates and just saving enough money to buy a house in the neighborhood with the good schools is a top priority. “I’ve always been good at X so I’m going to focus on that,” is what I often think. 

Every task that has been presented to most of us looks like an achievement of some sort. We want to pass a test, get into a good school, design a good experiment, make a new discovery, publish a peer reviewed paper, learn how to operate a new instrument, and defend a thesis. We want to get a job, make more money, buy a house, start a family, and then?

More money? Eventually you have enough. More respect or power within your company? Doesn’t really float my boat, but it’s an interesting thing to think about.

The Game That is Your Career

For the readers  who are in your first job post school, welcome to the game that is your career. You’ve really got two or three actual options in front of you if you are a technical person.

1. You can progress in your career as a technical person either up the management ladder or up the individual contributor ladder

2. Move to the commercial ladder, typically as a product manager or as a sales person

3. Move to the operations side, perhaps regulatory compliance, quality assurance, or legal (yeah, go to law school).

The great thing about this game is there are relatively few players who are in it once you are in and you’ll see a lot of the same people over and over again. It’s a small world so treat people with respect and don’t burn bridges if you can help it. If you are interested in how high up the proverbial career ladder you can get, check out this interview I did with a chemical executive who started off in R&D.

I’m just about 6 years into this post-PhD career thing and I have no idea which direction I want to go. After thinking about this for about five years I’ve decided that I should at a minimum showcase that I can handle more responsibility. Essentially, I’ve got to pick a place, stay, and try to make things better.

Doing This For Another 30 Years

I’m not rich and neither is my wife so I suspect that I’ll be working for at least another 30 years (I’ll be 64 then), but part of my fear is that the nature of industrial R&D and product development will not stay the same for the next 30 years. I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic either. Go talk to the research fellows at your company (if they haven’t been laid off already) and ask them how things have changed. The big R&D teams that brought new innovative products to market often are gone and spending on R&D is going down. 

The below graph is R&D spending from the US chemical industry in billions of dollars. There is 14% less spend on R&D comparing 2014 to 2020 or about a 2% decline per year. I do not think that this decrease in spending is due to increased efficiency. I suspect that this decline will continue and if I extrapolate it out at a 2% decline, in 30 years the US chemical industry will be spending $5.6 billion dollars on R&D when I’m ready to retire. Factor in inflation and it looks worse.

Dror Poleg explained the situation neatly in his newsletter and how employees that make new products are really just calculated bets. Dror was talking about tech companies like Google or Facebook, but I think the logic applies to chemicals too: 

In such industries, the employees themselves are bets. Corporations hire tens of thousands of equally qualified people with the hope that one or a handful of them will come up with an idea that makes it all worthwhile. These companies are not recycling ideas, but they are recycling capital. They are using billions made from past successes to bet on employees who will maybe develop a future success that will help finance even more bets.

Much of the chemical industry is reliant on their past successes and the product teams in place are there to manage the current product portfolios. Maybe these teams come out with something incrementally new every few years. Ultimately, it’s about managing the business you’ve got now and acquiring any new entrants to your market that look ripe for takeover.

Start-ups might be the future of how we get new products to market. If the incumbent companies spend less on bringing new products to market every year then how is efficiency achieved? 

How do these companies create wealth if there is a decrease in the engine of wealth creation?

This newsletter is my hedge against my current career. At a minimum it’s a phenomenal networking tool and at best maybe it unlocks a career I’ve never even thought of in a few years.

For the professional chemists out there let me know how you think our jobs will change in the future. I would love to hear your thoughts.

Tony

This issue and the next 7 of The Polymerist are sponsored by:

I’m not 100% sure when I first went into Crisis Mode, but I think it’s something that I’ve shifted in and out of since being an undergraduate. There was the sense of a looming week of finals where I think a lot of us figured out how to pull all-nighters fueled with coffee and food from 7-11. When I graduated from the University of Maryland in 2009, we had the Great Recession, another crisis. 

Currently, we have Covid-19 variants, supply chain disruptions, inflation, climate change, and probably something else coming. Crises are abundant these days. I’m not here to write about that though. I’m after something more selfish, the crises we deal with at our jobs.

These crises are often constructs of people in positions of power that have to answer to others such as their shareholders. Investors want to see a return on their invested capital, so they push the CEO to grow revenue. The CEO pushes aggressive goals to their reports and the goals get cascaded down. Goals almost always need to be accomplished by the end of the year. Many of us just had to have conversations about if we accomplished our goals for 2021.

The goals for 2022 are being set now and the timelines are probably aggressive. I would argue that the timelines leave minimal room for error or account for the fact that almost everyone is getting a new job these days. These sorts of personnel disruptions can leave the remaining team “holding the bag” on someone else’s project.

When we get a new project or we are continuing into the next phase of a large project it’s relatively easy for those with experience to map out the Gantt chart in our minds and see how little room there is for error or supplier disruptions. We (or at least myself here) typically end up pursuing multiple parallel paths towards our goal as a way to mitigate risk of failure. This can also sometimes double or triple the amount of work. Things are worse when you are 100% dependent on others for getting their jobs done so that you can do yours.

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My first experience with this unique pressure of others being 100% dependent on your work was in graduate school. I had recently joined my thesis adviser’s research group and this other group of polymer engineers at Case Western Reserve University were waiting on my group to supply them with biobased epoxy resins that they could study for viability in making composites. To make matters worse, our research group was moving to a different school that summer, and I had to teach full time in organic chemistry labs. Crisis Mode: On.

Being in Crisis Mode is unique in that it is surprising what we can accomplish. By November of that first year in the group I had successfully synthesized a whole family of new epoxy resins, was working on my very first paper (published in Biomacromolecules), and getting ready for my oral candidacy defense. I had seemingly accomplished something I thought impossible, but what was the cost? 

I was in some sort of Crisis Mode throughout graduate school because I was afraid of failure. I was able to publish a lot of papers, but the cost was high in retrospect. My high school friendships had deteriorated to the point of non-existence, I barely saw my friends from college/post college that were outside of polymer chemistry, and the little bit of leftover money I had I spent going to see my family. 

Crisis Mode is exhausting. I know a lot of people might still be in some version of it as supply chain crises continue and last minute substitutions for legacy raw materials are made just in time to continue delivering products to customers without disruptions. These situations can also be opportunities for suppliers looking to enter into a new market that was dominated by one or two players who have put their smaller customers on allocation. The term “allocation” means how much a customer can purchase is limited and often doesn’t meet the required demand. 

Making a good return on invested capital to your shareholders is important, but having your employees operate in a perpetual state of Crisis Mode is not sustainable. If the business doesn’t make money then it is unlikely that your company will be around for much longer and the same is true if your employees start quitting for better opportunities at your competitors. Jan 3rd was the first working day for most and I saw a slew of people posting on LinkedIn about their new jobs.

The Great Reshuffle

I suspect that the Great Resignation or maybe it should be called the Great Reshuffle will continue. Employees are figuring out what types of careers they want to have, especially after having taken a break at the end of December. It might be a promotion at a competitor or perhaps a role that had been previously denied to them at their current place of employment. Sometimes it's exactly the same job, but without the stress of their current place of employment.

Having a workforce that is constantly on edge is not healthy for a company and as more people leave without a ready replacement the more stressful it is for the remaining employees to carry the extra burden. There is a negative feedback loop of destruction that can feed itself here. At chemical companies this is true across all facets of the company from the operators at the plants to the chemists in the labs to the supply chain professionals trying to find new suppliers. These issues of attrition are even worse when the professionals who covered that extra bit leave and there are not robust business processes that new employees can operate within upon being hired.

If we think of a punishment and reward scenario for employees I suspect that punishment has been the leading motivator for many organizations. In my experience there has always been a “we can get someone else to do your job” mentality even if its unspoken and it’s somewhat true, but I suspect it’s getting more difficult. 

I get it. Rewards are costly, but attrition if it runs away can result in brain drains of entire companies. A good example of runaway “managed” attrition was recently profiled by Alex Kantrowitz in Big Technology. 

“The crisis right now is good people are leaving, and hiring is struggling,” said a former Amazon director. “And they are being asked to manage people out at a more aggressive rate because they are behind.”

If you are leading a company or are in a position to make decisions my suggestion is to do what you can to retain the people you value. I’m witnessing an unprecedented job market for chemists and engineers right now and I suspect that it will continue into 2022. Here is an excerpt from the venerable Chemjobber in his last column at C&EN:

While I cannot predict the future, I am extremely confident in advising people to apply now. Do not wait until “the right time,” whether it’s next month or next year. Do the work of putting together a résumé and a cover letter as soon as possible. This is an unusually good time to be a job seeker in industrial chemistry. Here’s hoping for a 2022 in which we can be free of this pandemic and we all have that job that we are seeking.

It’s amazing what we can do as scientists and engineers when our backs are against the wall and we have to deliver results, especially when we work together. Crisis Mode should be reserved for crises and it seems like we have been in some sort of crisis for the past two years—both at work and outside of work. We all need a break and I’m hoping that 2022 is the year we get one.

Tony

The Polymerist Is Sponsored By:

The Great Resignation is happening as I write this and there are many job openings in the chemical industry that are not necessarily public. Reach out to a specialty recruiter like Stephanie Kemp. Send inquiries and resumes to skemp@cps4jobs.com

My Conversation With Boudewijn Van Lent

If you work in the chemical industry or you want to and you have a PhD in chemistry then this is a great start. Having a strong technical understanding of the chemical business from the technology side is a good starting position to the business side of the chemical industry. Boudewijn (B-OW-Deh-W-ayN) was an executive at GCP Applied Technologies for the concrete and cement group. He was in charge of the business unit’s global profit and loss statement or P&L with revenues of about $500-600 million per year. He didn’t get there through the traditional route of Harvard Business School and management consulting, but rather he got there through the lab.

Boudewijn has taken a new role at DuPont Sustainable Solutions, a consulting spinoff of DuPont.  He advises executives of  chemical companies both in the U.S. and internationally on Operational Improvements, Operational Risk Management (ORM), and Sustainability.  I wanted to know how he ended up as an executive and advisor to executives of chemical companies after starting his career in R&D. 

So, I reached out and asked him on LinkedIn.

Boudewijn van Lent got his PhD in physical and colloid chemistry from Wageningen University & Research in 1989. He started his career at Bayer as a specialist on the technical side by developing new products and processes in Leverkusen, Germany after graduate school. After about 7-8 years of this Boudewijn was seeking something different, to be global, and that is how he ended up managing a group of scientists in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a research and development leader he was often in meetings with many of the commercial leaders within Bayer’s Polymers division (now known as Covestro).

Back in the early 90s Bayer’s Polymer division in North America, were not as big as they are today as Covestro. This was a key market for growth for Bayer and Boudewijn told me that “because I was in these meetings with the commercial leaders I was pitching ideas when they were trying to figure out how to grow the business.”

That’s how he ended up with the rubber division in Canada leading R&D efforts, application development, and he had a big request to increase sales through a technical approach. Boudewijn and his technical team doubled sales of one of the specialty products in 3 years through working closely with the sales and marketing teams. In our conversation this is what became apparent as his specialty. When Lanxess spun out of Bayer, Boudewijn was asked to head up the Technical rubber Business unit in NA and he moved into his first GM role in 2004.

Boudewijn is known for getting troubled businesses on a path towards growth and performing at a better level. He has held executive roles at many companies, including my current employer, across the chemical industry. But what advice would he give to a younger version of himself?

Advice To His Younger Self

I think the best piece of advice Boudewijn gave during our talk was, “If you want to do something, just do it well. Don’t be afraid to go out of your comfort zone and address projects adjacent to your field of expertise. I took this to mean that if you are going to be a scientist in the chemical industry then just do it very well. Push for the direction you want to go.

If you are going to spend your career in the chemical industry Boudewijn also told me that, “your heart better be in it.” You might spend your whole career working with a very specific type of polymer or within a specific class of chemistry and if you don’t love it then it might hinder you from doing the job well (see advice above). Further, the industry is always in flux and this means that it’s best to not get too specialized.

“You don’t want to pigeonhole yourself. You can be a specialist, but this is not the same as getting pigeonholed,” he told me. Professional chemists should be getting enough skills in their current roles to transition out if needed. Boudewijn’s example was if you started off as a polymer chemist making vinyl records for the music industry, but then CDs came onto the market. Can you jump to the polycarbonate field or can you move to other applications of vinyl, perhaps in vinyl siding or pipes? 

The final piece of advice was that being a team player is important. This might sound cliché, but if you are the person who makes every team better either through your ability to motivate, bring out the creativity of others, or that can enhance communication then this is very valuable. You can be the most talented chemist in the company, but if you can’t function in a team then it doesn’t really matter. Companies are like sports teams and the higher quality team always wins.

Where The Industry Is Headed

Boudewijn spent 15 years with Bayer and over 30 years in the chemical industry. I wanted to get his take on how the chemical industry has changed since he started and where he thinks it’s headed next.

“The chemical industry has changed a lot. It has reorganized itself completely. Bayer is completely different now than when I started there. DuPont is completely different. ICI dissolved,” He told me. The age of the wide business portfolio conglomerates appears to be over and companies have organized themselves into purer plays that are specific to different end markets. This is because it gives shareholders better control over their portfolios. Instead of just being in chemicals they can target specific markets where they think there will be growth.

A big wave of change going through the chemical industry is one of sustainability. An example would be how polyurethanes were invented at Bayer (now Covestro) and with the increased volume of polyurethane mattresses, Covestro is for example figuring out how to depolymerize them back into something useful. This pressure for sustainability might come from shareholders, but there is also pressure from the public and from internal stakeholders as well. There are similar things happening at Shell and Neste in the oil and gas industry for example. Dow is attempting to make net-zero emission steam crackers. Chemical companies are investing billions into sustainability right now.

The second big thing for the chemical industry is going to be digitization. Digital twins of chemical plants and modeling reaction conditions can help de-risk new products or process trials before they happen. Results from R&D efforts in the lab can be data mined to see the bigger picture. There are also opportunities in digitization to better understand customer behavior and manage supply chains. BASF Venture Capital recently invested into bioinformatics and machine learning for AgTech. Seebo is a start-up trying to use AI to mitigate production losses via artificial intelligence. The interface between computer science and chemistry appears to be a place of growth.

Boudewijn also told me that the industry is cyclical. If you can manage the downtimes, things will ultimately come back. 

Perhaps in 20 years the purer play companies will try to gain efficiency by becoming conglomerates or gain supply chain efficiency through vertical integration?

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My Conclusion

My big takeaway from my conversation with Boudewijn was that he got the majority of his training from one company, which went through it’s own series of reinvention from Bayer to Covestro. In our modern era of changing jobs every few years for that extra 10-20% pay bump, staying at a job for more than 5 years can seem crazy. I think perhaps that staying somewhere for longer than 5 years might be a good way to level up your career, especially if those above you decide to go somewhere else during the great resignation.

For those who want to go to the business side like Boudewijn, the one advantage his PhD gave him in the business world of chemicals was he was able to understand the business from a fundamental technical basis. In addition, the analytical skills obtained in a technical education are a real asset in determining critical issues and opportunities for a business.

Your PhD and professional experience as a chemist or engineer can be differentiator over a former McKinsey Consultant with an MBA from Harvard Business School.

On Wanting More

When you are a new scientist or just starting out in the chemical industry you are usually just really happy to have a job. Being able to go out to eat at a restaurant and not feeling guilt or living alone seem like real luxuries. Eventually, we all adapt to our new normal and we might want a bit more. It’s normal to want a promotion or to make more money. It’s normal to want to have more responsibility, especially if you feel that you can do better than those that are above you. 

Eventually, you’ll get asked a question about what you want to do in the future. You probably already know what feels like a safe answer for your technical career track. You can also probably predict the future of what a technical career track might look like based on your coworkers and you can probably model your future compensation. For many of us, this is exactly what we want and we want it to be stable until we retire. Steve Jobs described this almost perfectly:

I think it’s OK to want more. Be honest with yourself and your family about what exactly it is that you want and why. From what I can see, the higher up you move in any company either in the chemical industry, or a law firm, or in the government the more you are going to work. If your goal is to have a weekend house on a lake where you can fall asleep to the sound of loons on the water—go for it. If you want to walk your kids to school in the morning, work for part of the day, and get started on a Beef Wellington for dinner—go for it. Half the battle is knowing what you want and communicating it to your friends and family. The other half is getting there.

For many of us conversations about our careers with our employers happen at the end of the year. I hope this issue of the newsletter brings you some value in your own career.

Tony

The Polymerist is presented by:

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It should be no surprise that as a polymer chemist I spend a significant time in a laboratory. Throughout the pandemic I’ve actually been working in person for the majority of the time while wearing additional layers of personal protective equipment with my existing layers of personal protective equipment. My job requires both physically dependent skills and specialized knowledge. 

I would categorize myself and other industrial chemists and scientists as both highly skilled and highly knowledgeable. Our physical skills are the actual execution of experiments, operation of specialized equipment (manual shimming an NMR anyone?), handling of hazardous chemicals, visual observations and note taking of results. Our knowledge is the design of experiments, knowing which direction to pursue with ambiguous information or non-specific project requirements, understanding the process of developing not only a patentable technology, but being able to turn it into a product to name a few. The profession of physical sciences is one where being physically present is required much like construction, manufacturing, and healthcare.

I was very fortunate in that I lived very close to where my lab was located in North Cambridge, Massachusetts whereas my coworkers often have anywhere between 30-60 minutes of commuting one way. We just finished packing up our labs to be moved to a different location about a 30 minute drive north of where I live now so once those labs reopen I’ll have to drive like the majority of other people.

For all intensive purposes this is a pay cut for me with the requirement to drive to work. The true cost of commuting has been calculated previously by others and Anne Helen Peterson recently wrote about commuting in her newsletter and she wrote: 

With that said: the pandemic has underlined that most people working office jobs do not, in fact, need to be in their offices every day — and millions of people working those jobs were wasting unpaid hours of their day getting into those offices. If your presence is not necessary to do your job, daily commutes are a waste. Full stop.

But for scientists and engineers that work with things in the physical world then being in-person is a requirement. Having a commute is a requirement if you want to build something that you can touch and feel. Chemists are in a sense sculptors, but on a very small scale and their building blocks are molecules. This in-person requirement does a few things in terms of career potential for chemists, but the primary one is location dependence.

Dror Poleg has written extensively about real estate, the dispersion of the workforce due to Covid-19 and the internet, and he has an excellent article in the New York Times about the future of work. This paragraph stuck out to me: 

It seems safe to say that total demand for offices will diminish to a moderate degree. The bigger changes will be in how total demand is reshuffled and what office providers will have to do to remain competitive. Most office activity will not move to homes or to the cloud. Instead, it is likely to be redistributed within and between cities, with a variety of new employment areas popping up and saving many people the trouble of simultaneous commuting to a central business district.

Dror has an interesting take on real estate, cities, and the future of work. One main thesis of his is that cities became popular places to live and work because being able to recruit the best talent for specific jobs requires a large skilled workforce. When I first moved to New York City for graduate school I was at a bar that had free pizza when you bought drinks and someone asked me, “did you move here for opportunities?” So, location has always been important for scientists and engineers and it will continue to be during the next pandemic.

Laboratory work is unlike office work in that the buildings are often very specific, have high energy consumption, and are held to different standards with respect to safety and outgoing materials such as hazardous waste. Laboratory space is also not widely available, it costs significantly more than typical office space to construct and retrofit, and it’s not something that can occupy floors 45-47 of a skyscraper. Thus, if you wanted to start a company in the physical sciences space it would require at a minimum access to a laboratory, which can be hard to find if you are not incubating or starting a company at a university.

Cities that have a significant investment into laboratory space that is occupied will most likely stay that way. Essentially, the great dispersion that people are writing about when it comes to Covid-19 doesn’t apply to the majority of physical scientists and engineers. 

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Location Dependent Salaries and The Cost Of Living

In my current job I had a coworker who moved to the Boston area during a pandemic after she graduated to be better positioned to get a job. We were coworkers for about 10 months until she found a new job that utilized the skillset she wanted to develop and here is a surprise--it paid more. The average rent for an apartment in Cambridge, MA is about $3200/month. If we go with the old recommendation that your housing costs should be a quarter to a third of a monthly wage then on average the workforce should be making $115000-$153,000 a year to live in Cambridge. 

This is why my coworkers have anywhere from 30-60 minutes of commute time going one direction. So, let’s look further abroad for lower cost places to live in Massachusetts or even say Kittery, Maine (yes, you would have to cross ANOTHER STATE to get to Massachusetts). Average rent in Kittery is $1900 a month, it’s actually increased by ~60% since late 2019, so living in Kittery you would be comfortable at $64800-$8600 a year, but if we throw in a 60 mile commute at $0.56/mile (IRS) that is about $67 a day in additional costs to the worker, which is about $16,400 for a 49 week working year (assuming 3 weeks time off).

I’m writing about this because I think wages for scientists and engineers should increase, especially in places where there is a higher cost of living. Gathering wage data for scientists and engineers is tricky, but based on my network and the people I’ve talked to there is not a lot of location dependent wages. If anything, I am observing the inverse of what is prevalent in technology. I see high salaries in places like Ohio or Michigan compared to job postings that I’ll see in higher cost of living cities such as Boston or the District of Columbia/Maryland/Virginia (DMV) area. I suspect higher salaries in the Midwest is because it is harder to lure talent away from the coasts. Further, because some of these in-person jobs might be co-located with a manufacturing operation there are not a lot of job opportunities down the street in the event you get laid off.

Getting laid off is a real possibility and many jobs never get posted. I once helped a customer of mine fill a chemist role that was never advertised or posted anywhere. Networks matter. When I was an early career chemist looking for my first job post-PhD it felt impossible. The longer I spend in the chemical industry the more recruiters reach out to me for jobs that are often not relevant. A good recruiter could be the person to lead you to that next level job where your salary goes up significantly, you get stock, the location is one you've always wanted, or all of the above. Check out Task Force Talent if you are looking for a job or looking to hire for a key position.

Where I Think Science Jobs Are Headed In The Short Term

I think there is an explosion of investment right now in synthetic biology companies and this might even be the decade that these investments pay off. The scientists that work at these companies are sort of like software developers, but they are all going to be highly location dependent and it will require more work to scale a company from the lab to a larger batch or continuous reactor. Cities that have companies capable of installing and converting laboratory infrastructure will be well positioned to capture the rents that these companies will need to pay to develop their products. The cities that come to mind right now are as follows in no particular order:

1. Boston Area (where I am)

2. Bay Area Cities

3. Houston

4. San Diego

5. Greater New York Area

Location matters and this list includes some of the most expensive metropolitan areas in the country. If you want to be a scientist these are some of the cities that I think will be good places to move to if you are seeking new opportunities and have the monetary funds required to do so. If you are a broke graduate student don’t worry too much. If you are talented, companies will gladly import your talent from wherever you are to where they need you. In the event you work in one of these cities there is a sort of “available jobs” safety net of being able to find employment elsewhere if required. A coworker of mine once commented that being a polymer chemist in Houston was awesome because there was always someone willing to pay you more. Another coworker of mine who lacked a PhD told me that being a PhD scientist in Boston is like being a professional sports player in free agency.

The Future Of Synthetic Chemistry Might Be Biology Or Enzyme Driven.

My thesis adviser has been expounding on the benefits of chemoenzymatic synthesis of enzymatic polymer degradation for decades now. We might be getting to the point where start-ups are once again seeking to disrupt the chemical industry. The primary method I hear about these days is synthetic biology. It’s easier for me to point to failures right now than it is success in the start-up world, but Evonik has been successful and so has DSM.

Synthetic biology is interesting for numerous reasons, but the chemicals and materials coming out of a cell or a chemoenzymatic reactor are still going to need scientists and engineers to turn them into products unless the goal is to produce commodity chemicals. If you are a synthetic biology company trying to produce commodity chemicals I tip my hat to your audacity and gumption. These companies will need a talented sales force, marketing support, quality control, and process engineers just like everyone else. Plenty of the people reading this newsletter can definitely work in these spaces either directly or in supporting them (i.e. Cytiva).

If I were to categorize the 1990s-2020s I would say that these were the decades where being in “tech” as we call it now was super lucrative. I think that beyond the 2020s being “in science” will be super lucrative (I hope).

The Future Of Commercial Real Estate Is Lab Space.

This means that real estate needs are going to change. New jobs might become remote, but for people like me location dependence is everything. The future of commercial real estate right in the cities I wrote about above will be in laboratory space. I wrote that it’s hard to convert floors in a skyscraper to laboratory space, but why is this?

Typically, labs need a lot of ventilation in the form of fume hoods and other engineering controls where HVAC plays a big role. Even getting this stuff installed in a retrofit might take forever due to a lack of HVAC contractors. Labs also have a lot of equipment so the buildings that were once designed to hold cubicles and people named Milton with red staplers might be required to hold more weight per square foot. 

I’m writing this to you all now at home because my company sold our campus in North Cambridge to IQHQ, a life sciences laboratory real estate developer. The place where I used to walk to work will become Alewife Park and most of the buildings will be knocked down to make way for completely new laboratories. The trend of more life science laboratory space received national attention in Bloomberg from Patrick Sisson who wrote about it for CityLab: 

While the sector is booming, office-to-lab conversions aren’t ever going to be big enough to buoy entire commercial districts suffering from the office slowdown. “There isn’t a massive trend where you’re going to see, like, 10% of all office space get converted,” says John Cunningham, a broker with JLL and co-chair of the firm’s Life Sciences Advisory Council. “But in a market where there’s high demand, it can be a niche situation that makes sense.”.

After having gone from having a lab and a desk in my company’s building to just having a desk in my apartment is a big change. I look forward to going back once our new lab is outfitted with the right stuff.

Tony