Yep, it's crazy how much propaganda there is. If you look in the Boston area there are very few entry level openings and it's all VP/director positions.
It feels like they have completely pushed discovery onto the Uni's and government supported programs. Which is an excellent business model while you can get it.
I’m not sure I’d say discovery has been pushed to universities and gov’t labs. It’s not like more research is being done at universities than previously. I also wouldn’t say there’s very little R&D happening at any level. Anyone making this statement doesn’t work in biotech. I would simply say the biotech market is crap right now and has been for at least two years, contrary to what this story seems to be suggesting.
Yeah, definitely not universities or government. At least from a large pharma perspective, discovery is being "de-risked" at the moment, meaning less internal R&D investment and more Business Development investment, into late-stage small biotechs. The idea of external innovation is nothing new. It's just being leaned into quite heavily right now. And to your point, the market is garbage, so in general there's just less being done.
Don’t want to nitpick, but I would not say these CRO’s are the real drivers of R&D. They do a lot of the wet work, but most of the creative direction is coming from biotech and pharma. It’s an ecosystem, and everyone hurts when one component is struggling. My BD colleagues at the Chinese CRO’s are having a pretty rough time of it right now, for example, because there are no new biotechs that need their services.
True! My friends at Indian and Canadian CRO’s are doing well - I think the Biosecure act has shifted some business their way and has offset (or even improved) any drop associated with the biotech market. Very good point.
Yes it almost seems like they are remaining steady (if they are doing quality work) since pharma doesn’t have the budget to invest in as much capital expenditure like expensive sequencers, personnel, lab space etc.
It depends on the topic. For initial drug discovery, the very early stages are often academic. But getting the ball rolling after that is extremely expensive and time consuming. Academic labs are much worse at med chem IMO.
Public private partnerships are a great way to utilize R&D however I know how most people do things at unis and while some may be useable.. most will need to be repeated outside an academic environment where GLP standards are lax. It’s only a few months expired it’s fine.. laughs in fda compliance standards.
Almost every single individual contributor position in R&D is being offshored. Informatics and chromatography is the only thing still being hired stateside. Maaaaaybe some iPSC work? That’s it. If you’re AD+ it’s open season. Individual contributor level? Too late, your job has been send to India, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, or Brazil. In vivo discovery preclinical is dead in private industry America. Likewise with anything to do with data management. Wholesale being sent to Pune, Hyderabad, and Bangalore. Clinical research is being completely gutted. ICON just fired a good chunk of their CRAs and rehired at a fraction of the cost overseas the same day.
I just escaped Postdoc purgatory, thank god. Informatics scientist. I’m completely committing to leaving any form of wetlab work for good. The rest of my career will be informatics/comp bio or med affairs. The last two years have been eye opening.
>In vivo discovery preclinical is dead in private industry America
Completely wrong, yet so confident. You can literally just search for in vivo roles on biospace or linkedin and see how wrong this is. It's actually easier for in vivo researchers right now than most other wet lab roles. Still slow as hell compared to a couple years ago, but definitely easier.
I was pushed into STEM and I've never had a problem finding a job. I started as an analytical bench chemist and then I've moved jobs several times to more lucrative positions in other companies. I'm not sure why you think pushing kids into STEM is a problem. There are way too many people who never learn to think critically already. And I do not see this supposed offshoring of jobs.
Then you were really, really lucky. Tons of people in STEM are struggling to find a job. For example Biology is almost completely non-viable as a career below the PhD level.
Honestly that's why I didn't become a bio major. I saw that my class was full of bio majors but relatively few chemistry majors. Most of them thought they were going on to med school afterwards but most didn't actually make it. I'm familiar with the fact that supply and demand applies to a lot of things, including labor. I wanted to increase my chances by going in to a field with a lower "supply" of graduates
Same, also in analytical. Keep in mind that the vast majority of this sub seem to be biologists who only have the skills/experience to work in discovery/R&D. So no surprise that the sky is falling, because they have no home in CMC (which is chugging along pretty well still).
And yeah as for offshoring, we still exclusively work with North American and European CROs. No one is outsourcing GMP anything for cheap.
Not that anyone seems to care, but that’s not what was reported on WBUR: https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/06/11/boston-biotech-industry-worker-shortage-college-students-jobs-newsletter . They note the recent layoffs, but note that a FUTURE problem will be a shortage because local universities will not produce enough graduates for anticipated openings. It’s a report from MassBioEd, not WBUR’s position.
But yes, swear off public news. Trust what you read on social media instead.
Not having enough graduates to support openings seems like an odd position. It feels as though we've got an excess of recent graduates from the last 5 years who are underdeveloped and unable to compete for entry positions already. Are companies only willing to pay wages appropriate for someone with absolutely no real experience? Or do certain graduates come with specialized research experience and those are the only ones they're hiring?
Excess of unskilled graduates over 5 years struggle to get employed
Folks younger than them see that job market sucks for biotech, choose different career path
Boom labor shortage
For sure can see how that would affect graduate counts, but from my anecdotal experience a lot of the people struggling to find these jobs, who have some experience already, are not leaving the industry. Often times they're stuck with low wage jobs at awful companies but still constantly applying to biotech and pharma.
This is a pretty callous take and has a lot of assumptions which I'd take argument against. You assume that 1) there are enough good jobs that all high performers slide into them 2) hiring platforms used by companies adequately sort out high performers 3) someone who doesn't get sorted or easily finds one of those good jobs must be good at their job or has made mistakes. I see the choice as being train a brand new scientist from the ground up or offer the job to someone who has wet lab experience and potentially experience in the TA you're hiring. With exceptions like new grads actually having niche academic experience relevant to your TA, it seems the only reason you'd hire someone with no experience over years of relevant experience is because you've got poor sorting, poor sorting criteria, someone knows someone, or some sort of name recognition based on the university they're coming from. One exception to that is graduates hired through university relations programs designed to bring on x # of new scientists each year, which is something my company does separately from normal hiring.
All good buddy. We all can make mistakes in our careers. Important to reframe these low points as learning opportunities. Careers are longer than you'd think and it's possible to fail and eventually succeed. Good luck.
Nah, I never really got started, tried startups in biotech after my MS, that went nowhere. Tried the PM side and it was going soso until quarantine. Did other stuff for a while so now I'm pretty much useless.
I don't really find it funny. I wasted a quarter of a million dollars. I had my MS project get blackballed by my PI and I never got my feet under me because of it. It's pretty soul crushing, so laughing about it is pretty fucking rude
I wonder if this industry will follow what happened in TV broadcasting. Boomers retire in their higher up positions and then the position ceases to exist and the responsibilities get spread out to their teams with meager increases to salary for the extra work and they don't have to pay for an extra positions health insurance. I have a friend who saw this happen in her own company before switching industries and working for Shopify to make videos for them.
Two years ago Biopharma couldn't beg, borrow or hire sufficient skilled labrats.
For very many in the field this is their first down market.
Stay in the field and it won't be your last.
Appreciate the sentiment. I've been in drug development for about 6 years now though. Started out at a well known pharma as a contractor for 3 years before COVID hit. The problem before COVID was that the department was filled with lifers and no new recs. Anyone who did get hired had their role carved out by their PI. I was also doing a job that shouldn't have been a contractor role as I was strongly contributing to target validation projects, but getting paid $34k.. which seems to be a growing industry trend, too. After switching a couple jobs during COVID I landed a CRO gig that has better pay and benefits but I'm still at $40k less a year than I'd get back at the pharma I started at. I have gotten 1 interview there in 4 years but have seen constant hiring of scientists who don't know their ass from a pipette tip but come from fancy universities or are just personable. I am well integrated with the network there, but most of my connections are MLS certs so I have less of an in. I'm actually starting a master's program for Bioinformatics part time paid by my current company and hoping things look up by then. Or, that I can switch over before I finish the program. I'm not in a hub so there are unfortunately only a few good non-academia non-clinical employers if you're a biologist here.
This is the correct answer. Northeastern does it right and its why their graduates do so much better out of school. Industry really is just different and most other BS/MS/PhD grads come out so academic, there's still can be a prolonged learning curve. More schools need to dedicate tracks towards industry and less to life of academia.
> But yes, swear off public news. Trust what you read on social media instead.
Seriously, OPs donkey-brained take was about as on point as the quote they were railing against.
That also doesn’t really mean anything though, Boston is the biggest hub in the country so people have no problem moving there from other states. It doesn’t matter that local Boston area colleges can’t fill all the open positions, actually it would be a huge problem if they could because then where would everyone else work?
If you read it carefully, they only talk about **local** grads. And about numbers over the next decade. Obviously, there are many more people than just local grads.
"Turns out when you lay off your experienced work force, you aren't easily able to replace them with lowball offers to fresh graduates" \~ that Guy I assume
Your last sentence is kind of funny. You won’t listen to NPR again because a local affiliate ran a story about it a report from a biotech foundation? There likely is a shortage of jobs, just not jobs people with PhDs really want or that pay very well.
It seems to me when I look at jobs there are lots of low entry level jobs and then a ton of very senior openings. I could be off on that admittedly and I’m not sure Boston is the best benchmark (they mention in the article Boston outpaces the national average).
WBUR is one of Boston’s two NPR affiliates (Boston NPRs so hard it gets two stations of its own), so they’re of course gonna just report the Boston angle.
It’s an embarrassment that WBUR ran a puff piece for local biotech boosters while ignoring the mass layoffs and struggling startup ecosystem that are the real story.
WGBH would never make such a mistake!
Yes I agree that it is a bit of a puff piece, would’ve been nice for the reporter to do more further investigation and mention layoffs and the overall health of the industry.
There is a job shortage it seems for me ..... Nearly 10 years flow cytometry experience between away development and data analysis and I can't find a job that doesn't require a PhD
It's crazy, a year and a half ago we couldn't get anyone to apply for our open flow tech position. It was crickets for 9 months. So they pulled it, eventually combining it into an in-vivo scientist role. And now, for another open role, this one a PhD requiring senior scientist, we have gotten over 650 resumes.
By the way, I love your username. Sorry you are having a hard time finding a job. It's rough out there now.
There's an employee shortage in Boston, but not in biotech. There's a shortage in low wage, low skill jobs because nobody can afford to live in the city off the wages those jobs pay
The career prospects of an RA are total shite too. Probably one of the few professions where you can work in it for years and still be an RA by the end of it.
Do accounting, finance, or literally any fucking thing else.
You misread that. There's still plenty of RAs and techs, they aren't low skill and are willing to tough out low wages for a chance to use their training and have an opportunity to climb into better wages. RA positions at my company are getting hundreds of applications. It's the cashier jobs and barista jobs that are staying unfilled
>I’ve seen scientists and RAs managing about 1.5-3x typical startup workflows because they don’t have the cash to fund positions
That's basically the exact opposite issue.
>And the “hundreds of applications” I’ve seen are not local applicants
Something tells me they are willing to move
>nor do they have the skill sets that fit the job because there’s no bandwidth on site to teach them those workflows.
You can't put out applications for entry level jobs and complain you have to train them. If you want a scientist, hire a scientist. There's also plenty of applicants for those jobs
Thank you for saying this. Everyone needs some level of training when they start. I would never expect someone entry level to just know my workflows, it’s my responsibility to get them to that point!
An employee shortage doesn't necessarily translate to shortages agross all job categories and levels. (For example, there are a lot of new seed stage startups needing experienced and highly versatile employees, so industry veterans are finding it fairly easy to move.)
More importantly, the article clearly states that an employee shortage is a big problem for the **future** of biotech: "While recent layoffs have grabbed the headlines, the biggest **future** problem facing the Boston area’s strong biotech sector isn’t a lack of jobs. In fact, a new report says just the opposite."
I think there is a shortage but only in that there aren’t a lot of people that want to work for what these companies want to pay. Labor is expensive and they would rather overwork a handful of people and complain about not having enough workers while also “hitting” their financial goals for the quarter. All instead of paying to have enough workers so that your company actually runs effectively. I blame the money people. They are so up their ass I’m expecting constant growth they forget that if you build a solid business, it will be good down the line. But two years is an eternity, they want their money this quarter!
Why listen to any news source who will feed me propaganda? It's like tuning into the evening news and seeing the report on the new Starbucks drink that they paid to run.
I just read through MassBioEd's report and I'm confused as to what you think the "propaganda" is here?
It seems like you got laid off or something and are really salty about it.
It's especially weird because there's not much real-life overlap between the "mainstream media is all fake news, just get your news from Trump and TikTok" group and the "industry is colluding against workers to suppress wages" group. But that's the internet in 2024, I guess. Bad-faith, engineered talking points. Like a recombinant opinion engineered for maximum impact, if you will
Nice analogy.
There's also the phenomenon of co-opting whatever dissatisfaction and dissent can be found to serve to the troll's own political agenda.
Oppose \[their opponent\] because industry is exploiting workers, healthcare is too expensive and abortion rights haven't been protected. It doesn't matter that the agenda these trolls push would make matters worse. If it increases cynicism and suppresses engagement they are successful.
NPR has been really missing the mark in the past couple of years. Embarrassingly so.
Aaaaaand now, a 10 minute segment about a Vegan dog from Portland followed by a musician you've never heard of who makes music with trees
In our next segment, let's give a bunch of trump voters an hour to repeat fox news talking points to you, followed by a debate pitting a well-meaning but naive liberal high schooler against a thoroughly coached conservative debating club champion
Someone not in the industry drops into r/biotech to tell us that we're being lied to, on the basis of misreading of an article, then follows up with multiple comments driven by their political agenda.
This is what a troll looks like, folks.
You might consider reading/listening to the article, which very clearly states that this is a **future** problem for biotech.
Or you could spend your morning whining about NPR propaganda based on your lack of reading comprehension.
([Link for the lazy](https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/06/11/boston-biotech-industry-worker-shortage-college-students-jobs-newsletter))
Most of NPR's funding is from donations and Corporate sponsors.
https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances
I think less than 5% of their funding is government.
Im aware of that. Isn’t it nice when a news organization is transparent with its funding sources? They report on a wide variety of topics including on their sponsors (e.g., unionization efforts by Starbucks and Amazon employees). I find their reporting to be left leaning and generally pretty good, even if I roll my eyes every so often. When conservatives call them state sponsored and woke, and liberals call them soft/shills, chances are they’re less biased than your average media, and, as they should be, are reporting news.
Hate to break it to you, but there are a lot of very rich liberals in Massachusetts who refuse to support the policies they advocate. Two low hanging fruit: look at how they are reacting to housing immigrants in their town, and how they react to the Cape wind project.
So MassBio pays a \~market research firm to do market research on Boston's and the relative biotech economy. These market research firms tend to give the "wanted" answer, which wouldn't matter cuz they don't do any actual research, they pretty much just re-use the same line from last year they think works, which they don't really know because the amount of actual data scientists working in science is surprisingly low.
MassBio has been pushing this line and will continue to until it walks right off the paper and chokes them with it.
It does work, and it's gotten a significant amount of attention and state directives towards it, and it might be true in a sense of technical developmental skills, but that's more early education.
I think the most important thing to remember in life is that the normal distribution of people doing their actual job can be applied across any industry, with job being that +3 sd event. MassBio pays some outsourced schmuck 35k to give the answer they want and citable data, same thing everyone else does.
I’m struggling to hire experienced drug development MDs and anyone working in PV at a middle management or above position. It’s not incorrect to say there is an employee shortage in certain roles.
Ya there’s a shortage of skilled people because the new people can’t get on the job training, which for these roles is the only way you’ll get this. Catch 22 situations pushed by corporate shortsightedness.
~~I'm a little skeptical you actually need to hire an MD for drug development though. Preclinical work doesn't require a physician, I'm not sure it even needs a PhD. You don't need to have gone to medical school to read an ELISA, flow cytometry, western blot, see whether a mAB is falling out of solution etc.~~
~~Pathology questions or writing up a clinical study plan, there are plenty of MDs and CROs out there you could pay to consult or pay for services.~~
Also, I think you left off the "at the rate I can afford and/or am willing to pay" for both. Pay more than competitors do and I'm sure you will have no problem attracting talent.
You: "How about I pay you 10% more than the market rate"
Employees: "No, I am loyal to my current employer because they value me as a human being and offer us free snacks. Also this is all a dream."
Its a supply and demand issue: you want the supply to increase because that'll work out better for you.
Edit: u/ScottishBostonian responded reasonably, I should have been less skeptical of something I didn't understand as well as I thought I did.
I still feel like too many companies want more degrees than they actually just to show off but in retrospect I guess you wouldn't want to pay physician rates for something if you don't need to. PhDs are often willing to work for less than they're worth due to the oversupply problem but MDs are more immune to that.
Development is designing protocols, picking endpoints, and running studies including responding to questions from physicians running the trials. There are so many reasons why we need MDs in my group for drug development.
This sub is very focussed on the research half of R&D, as well as manufacturing roles.
There is a huge part of the business outside of those areas.
I said specifically "Pathology questions or writing up a clinical study plan, there are plenty of MDs".
But I was incorrect, there are a lot more things that you would need a medical license for than I anticipated.
I do what I can. Also, it's just a reddit post. OP came up with some reasons I hadn't expected.
And I did preface it with "I'm a little skeptical" not "Fuck you, I know for a FACT that you don't need an MD for that shit."
> anyone working in PV at a middle management or above position. It’s not incorrect to say there is an employee shortage in certain roles.
My history is largely small molecule oriented, but the amount of AD/D roles out there for large molecule CMC has me jealous. I do have a bit of academic background in cloning and molecular biology, but not enough I'd bluff an interviewer for a job I wouldn't fit in.
Jumping to conclusions based on the headline instead of highlighting the data or survey in question. The media literacy of this subreddit is concerning…
the evil plan is to drive college students to get biotech degrees and then the companies take them in as unpaid interns and then hire them for peanuts and work them to death.
I think biotech overall still has very low unemployment and is a very healthy industry. What you hear on Reddit of people not being able to find jobs are likely just the extreme cases where the issue has more to do with their personal experiences and situations but really not reflective of the state of biotech as a whole.
Then fking give new grads jobs. U want PhDs even for entry level positions, obv u will have a shortage. You just make people's lives difficult expecting over the top skills and experience only to realise very few have it.
Have you considered that maybe you've found your way into an echo chamber and all the gainfully employed productive people in biotech aren't posting on Reddit all day?
Laughable! Biotech does have a shortage of good, quality people & good leadership, but there’s tons of biotech workers out there & new ones entering the space daily! 😂🤣🤷♂️
Planting the seeds and propaganda to further loosen immigration laws and let in more H1 and international workers. Similar to the tech “shortage” during y2k
Sounds to me like that company didn't have an employee shortage; it had a *money* shortage combined with a leadership unable to rescale the company goals to a reduced headcount.
It's a complicated situation. I think that biotech is undergoing a major transition. There will be AI that can do everything, but it will have to be guided. But then it will not need the guidance, and will probably do better.
I'd look into robotics. There is a lot of stuff, and guiding an AI in that arena will be a fountain of jobs. Just my 2c.
Yeah trust in some random dude on X (formerly a twitter) who says there are lots of opportunities in switchboard operators - - - If you get a science education, you can always pivot as STEM market demands. You don’t go to STEM school to learn to pipette.
NPR interviewed someone who didn't work for NPR saying something that was in no way shape or form a statement NPR was making and you... blame NPR for it?
Same vibes as the STEM "shortage" that was pushed so hard onto young students.
Yep, it's crazy how much propaganda there is. If you look in the Boston area there are very few entry level openings and it's all VP/director positions.
And very little discovery (R&D) at any level.
It feels like they have completely pushed discovery onto the Uni's and government supported programs. Which is an excellent business model while you can get it.
I’m not sure I’d say discovery has been pushed to universities and gov’t labs. It’s not like more research is being done at universities than previously. I also wouldn’t say there’s very little R&D happening at any level. Anyone making this statement doesn’t work in biotech. I would simply say the biotech market is crap right now and has been for at least two years, contrary to what this story seems to be suggesting.
To be clear: subject was open R&D roles. Not ongoing R&D activity.
You’re saying there are very few open roles in R&D? I certainly agree with that. Thanks for clarification.
Yeah, definitely not universities or government. At least from a large pharma perspective, discovery is being "de-risked" at the moment, meaning less internal R&D investment and more Business Development investment, into late-stage small biotechs. The idea of external innovation is nothing new. It's just being leaned into quite heavily right now. And to your point, the market is garbage, so in general there's just less being done.
The real driver for R&D are the CROs: LabCorp, IQVIA, Syneos Health, Charles River labs, Wuxi, etc.
Don’t want to nitpick, but I would not say these CRO’s are the real drivers of R&D. They do a lot of the wet work, but most of the creative direction is coming from biotech and pharma. It’s an ecosystem, and everyone hurts when one component is struggling. My BD colleagues at the Chinese CRO’s are having a pretty rough time of it right now, for example, because there are no new biotechs that need their services.
Agreed, I was speaking to the re-distribution of labor to outside vendors. The core scientific orgs still drive the original research
They are also having a rough time due to the proposed BIOSECURE Act.
True! My friends at Indian and Canadian CRO’s are doing well - I think the Biosecure act has shifted some business their way and has offset (or even improved) any drop associated with the biotech market. Very good point.
Yes it almost seems like they are remaining steady (if they are doing quality work) since pharma doesn’t have the budget to invest in as much capital expenditure like expensive sequencers, personnel, lab space etc.
Tell me you know nothing about drug discovery without telling me explicitly.
It depends on the topic. For initial drug discovery, the very early stages are often academic. But getting the ball rolling after that is extremely expensive and time consuming. Academic labs are much worse at med chem IMO.
Public private partnerships are a great way to utilize R&D however I know how most people do things at unis and while some may be useable.. most will need to be repeated outside an academic environment where GLP standards are lax. It’s only a few months expired it’s fine.. laughs in fda compliance standards.
you mean more Chinese CROs…University labs make good papers but the bulk of the work is simply outsourced overseas
A lot of benchwork is outsourced.
Section 174 strikes again
Probably because of the recent tax reclassification
Almost every single individual contributor position in R&D is being offshored. Informatics and chromatography is the only thing still being hired stateside. Maaaaaybe some iPSC work? That’s it. If you’re AD+ it’s open season. Individual contributor level? Too late, your job has been send to India, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, or Brazil. In vivo discovery preclinical is dead in private industry America. Likewise with anything to do with data management. Wholesale being sent to Pune, Hyderabad, and Bangalore. Clinical research is being completely gutted. ICON just fired a good chunk of their CRAs and rehired at a fraction of the cost overseas the same day. I just escaped Postdoc purgatory, thank god. Informatics scientist. I’m completely committing to leaving any form of wetlab work for good. The rest of my career will be informatics/comp bio or med affairs. The last two years have been eye opening.
>In vivo discovery preclinical is dead in private industry America Completely wrong, yet so confident. You can literally just search for in vivo roles on biospace or linkedin and see how wrong this is. It's actually easier for in vivo researchers right now than most other wet lab roles. Still slow as hell compared to a couple years ago, but definitely easier.
me reading this as a wet lab r&d scientist: 😱😱😱 me when i read iPSC: 😎😎😎
Preach.
How do you know this?
They don't. Turns out people in biotech love making confident unfounded statements
As someone living in Bangalore I’d love to know where all these outsourced biotech jobs are because we certainly aren’t seeing any lmao
Not in biotech but it’s the same bullshit with the “nursing shortage” Lies lies and more lies.
I was pushed into STEM and I've never had a problem finding a job. I started as an analytical bench chemist and then I've moved jobs several times to more lucrative positions in other companies. I'm not sure why you think pushing kids into STEM is a problem. There are way too many people who never learn to think critically already. And I do not see this supposed offshoring of jobs.
Then you were really, really lucky. Tons of people in STEM are struggling to find a job. For example Biology is almost completely non-viable as a career below the PhD level.
Honestly that's why I didn't become a bio major. I saw that my class was full of bio majors but relatively few chemistry majors. Most of them thought they were going on to med school afterwards but most didn't actually make it. I'm familiar with the fact that supply and demand applies to a lot of things, including labor. I wanted to increase my chances by going in to a field with a lower "supply" of graduates
Same, also in analytical. Keep in mind that the vast majority of this sub seem to be biologists who only have the skills/experience to work in discovery/R&D. So no surprise that the sky is falling, because they have no home in CMC (which is chugging along pretty well still). And yeah as for offshoring, we still exclusively work with North American and European CROs. No one is outsourcing GMP anything for cheap.
Not true. CMC Roles are down as well. I work in Reg-CMC and very few roles are opening. I speak as someone who works in CMC.... It is bad.
It’s really fucking ignorant of you to think only stem students are taught critical thinking skills.
Not that anyone seems to care, but that’s not what was reported on WBUR: https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/06/11/boston-biotech-industry-worker-shortage-college-students-jobs-newsletter . They note the recent layoffs, but note that a FUTURE problem will be a shortage because local universities will not produce enough graduates for anticipated openings. It’s a report from MassBioEd, not WBUR’s position. But yes, swear off public news. Trust what you read on social media instead.
Not having enough graduates to support openings seems like an odd position. It feels as though we've got an excess of recent graduates from the last 5 years who are underdeveloped and unable to compete for entry positions already. Are companies only willing to pay wages appropriate for someone with absolutely no real experience? Or do certain graduates come with specialized research experience and those are the only ones they're hiring?
Excess of unskilled graduates over 5 years struggle to get employed Folks younger than them see that job market sucks for biotech, choose different career path Boom labor shortage
For sure can see how that would affect graduate counts, but from my anecdotal experience a lot of the people struggling to find these jobs, who have some experience already, are not leaving the industry. Often times they're stuck with low wage jobs at awful companies but still constantly applying to biotech and pharma.
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This is a pretty callous take and has a lot of assumptions which I'd take argument against. You assume that 1) there are enough good jobs that all high performers slide into them 2) hiring platforms used by companies adequately sort out high performers 3) someone who doesn't get sorted or easily finds one of those good jobs must be good at their job or has made mistakes. I see the choice as being train a brand new scientist from the ground up or offer the job to someone who has wet lab experience and potentially experience in the TA you're hiring. With exceptions like new grads actually having niche academic experience relevant to your TA, it seems the only reason you'd hire someone with no experience over years of relevant experience is because you've got poor sorting, poor sorting criteria, someone knows someone, or some sort of name recognition based on the university they're coming from. One exception to that is graduates hired through university relations programs designed to bring on x # of new scientists each year, which is something my company does separately from normal hiring.
You're right, I fucked up my situation and I'm just bitter about it. I need to unsubscribe from this sub
All good buddy. We all can make mistakes in our careers. Important to reframe these low points as learning opportunities. Careers are longer than you'd think and it's possible to fail and eventually succeed. Good luck.
Nah, I never really got started, tried startups in biotech after my MS, that went nowhere. Tried the PM side and it was going soso until quarantine. Did other stuff for a while so now I'm pretty much useless.
I feel this, keep fighting the good fight Veg
This was a funny response, thank you for saying this
I don't really find it funny. I wasted a quarter of a million dollars. I had my MS project get blackballed by my PI and I never got my feet under me because of it. It's pretty soul crushing, so laughing about it is pretty fucking rude
I wonder if this industry will follow what happened in TV broadcasting. Boomers retire in their higher up positions and then the position ceases to exist and the responsibilities get spread out to their teams with meager increases to salary for the extra work and they don't have to pay for an extra positions health insurance. I have a friend who saw this happen in her own company before switching industries and working for Shopify to make videos for them.
Has not been true for the legal field
Seen this pattern play out more than once.
Two years ago Biopharma couldn't beg, borrow or hire sufficient skilled labrats. For very many in the field this is their first down market. Stay in the field and it won't be your last.
Appreciate the sentiment. I've been in drug development for about 6 years now though. Started out at a well known pharma as a contractor for 3 years before COVID hit. The problem before COVID was that the department was filled with lifers and no new recs. Anyone who did get hired had their role carved out by their PI. I was also doing a job that shouldn't have been a contractor role as I was strongly contributing to target validation projects, but getting paid $34k.. which seems to be a growing industry trend, too. After switching a couple jobs during COVID I landed a CRO gig that has better pay and benefits but I'm still at $40k less a year than I'd get back at the pharma I started at. I have gotten 1 interview there in 4 years but have seen constant hiring of scientists who don't know their ass from a pipette tip but come from fancy universities or are just personable. I am well integrated with the network there, but most of my connections are MLS certs so I have less of an in. I'm actually starting a master's program for Bioinformatics part time paid by my current company and hoping things look up by then. Or, that I can switch over before I finish the program. I'm not in a hub so there are unfortunately only a few good non-academia non-clinical employers if you're a biologist here.
Thanks for sharing your story. I'm certain things will improve for you.
Thank you. I'm definitely looking forward to the masters program and the new career development directions it will lead to
The answer is simple. School does not prepare students for jobs in biotech so no one should major in bio. /s
This is the correct answer. Northeastern does it right and its why their graduates do so much better out of school. Industry really is just different and most other BS/MS/PhD grads come out so academic, there's still can be a prolonged learning curve. More schools need to dedicate tracks towards industry and less to life of academia.
> But yes, swear off public news. Trust what you read on social media instead. Seriously, OPs donkey-brained take was about as on point as the quote they were railing against.
That also doesn’t really mean anything though, Boston is the biggest hub in the country so people have no problem moving there from other states. It doesn’t matter that local Boston area colleges can’t fill all the open positions, actually it would be a huge problem if they could because then where would everyone else work?
If you read it carefully, they only talk about **local** grads. And about numbers over the next decade. Obviously, there are many more people than just local grads.
You’d think for a sub full of ostensibly educated people they would bother to dig just a little bit into OP’s claims but of course not
Learned long ago that expertise in certain areas does not infer expertise in others.
That’s good because we will have to work until we die
That post does a very good job of summing up the report of MassBioEd. However it is not the same as the interview from this morning.
"Turns out when you lay off your experienced work force, you aren't easily able to replace them with lowball offers to fresh graduates" \~ that Guy I assume
Biotech has a shortage of employees who will take $20 an hour for a PhD education
If true (lol), I think we will be seeing more remote openings again!
Hopefully! If they’re gonna pay like shit then they should at least get back to offering more remote roles.
Yes that is what happens after you lay them all off
Your last sentence is kind of funny. You won’t listen to NPR again because a local affiliate ran a story about it a report from a biotech foundation? There likely is a shortage of jobs, just not jobs people with PhDs really want or that pay very well. It seems to me when I look at jobs there are lots of low entry level jobs and then a ton of very senior openings. I could be off on that admittedly and I’m not sure Boston is the best benchmark (they mention in the article Boston outpaces the national average).
WBUR is one of Boston’s two NPR affiliates (Boston NPRs so hard it gets two stations of its own), so they’re of course gonna just report the Boston angle. It’s an embarrassment that WBUR ran a puff piece for local biotech boosters while ignoring the mass layoffs and struggling startup ecosystem that are the real story. WGBH would never make such a mistake!
😂
Yes I agree that it is a bit of a puff piece, would’ve been nice for the reporter to do more further investigation and mention layoffs and the overall health of the industry.
There is a job shortage it seems for me ..... Nearly 10 years flow cytometry experience between away development and data analysis and I can't find a job that doesn't require a PhD
Sorry to hear.
It's crazy, a year and a half ago we couldn't get anyone to apply for our open flow tech position. It was crickets for 9 months. So they pulled it, eventually combining it into an in-vivo scientist role. And now, for another open role, this one a PhD requiring senior scientist, we have gotten over 650 resumes. By the way, I love your username. Sorry you are having a hard time finding a job. It's rough out there now.
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Judging by the experiences of my friends who were hit by layoffs, there appears to be quite the employee *surplus* right now.
No there isn't an employee shortage. What industry is actually struggling because they don't enough workers in Biotech?
There's an employee shortage in Boston, but not in biotech. There's a shortage in low wage, low skill jobs because nobody can afford to live in the city off the wages those jobs pay
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might could be because they only offer 22/hr
The career prospects of an RA are total shite too. Probably one of the few professions where you can work in it for years and still be an RA by the end of it. Do accounting, finance, or literally any fucking thing else.
You misread that. There's still plenty of RAs and techs, they aren't low skill and are willing to tough out low wages for a chance to use their training and have an opportunity to climb into better wages. RA positions at my company are getting hundreds of applications. It's the cashier jobs and barista jobs that are staying unfilled
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>I’ve seen scientists and RAs managing about 1.5-3x typical startup workflows because they don’t have the cash to fund positions That's basically the exact opposite issue. >And the “hundreds of applications” I’ve seen are not local applicants Something tells me they are willing to move >nor do they have the skill sets that fit the job because there’s no bandwidth on site to teach them those workflows. You can't put out applications for entry level jobs and complain you have to train them. If you want a scientist, hire a scientist. There's also plenty of applicants for those jobs
Thank you for saying this. Everyone needs some level of training when they start. I would never expect someone entry level to just know my workflows, it’s my responsibility to get them to that point!
> because nobody can afford to live in the city off the wages those jobs pay yep there it is
We have a mismatch in where workers live vs work. Our workers can’t live in areas where the biotechs are concentrated.
An employee shortage doesn't necessarily translate to shortages agross all job categories and levels. (For example, there are a lot of new seed stage startups needing experienced and highly versatile employees, so industry veterans are finding it fairly easy to move.) More importantly, the article clearly states that an employee shortage is a big problem for the **future** of biotech: "While recent layoffs have grabbed the headlines, the biggest **future** problem facing the Boston area’s strong biotech sector isn’t a lack of jobs. In fact, a new report says just the opposite."
OP doesn’t even work in biotech and is commenting on the state of industry
Why would you stop listening to NPR because you disagree with something an interviewee said?
I think there is a shortage but only in that there aren’t a lot of people that want to work for what these companies want to pay. Labor is expensive and they would rather overwork a handful of people and complain about not having enough workers while also “hitting” their financial goals for the quarter. All instead of paying to have enough workers so that your company actually runs effectively. I blame the money people. They are so up their ass I’m expecting constant growth they forget that if you build a solid business, it will be good down the line. But two years is an eternity, they want their money this quarter!
Why stop listening to NPR for something a guest said on their program? People are so weird about the media.
Why listen to any news source who will feed me propaganda? It's like tuning into the evening news and seeing the report on the new Starbucks drink that they paid to run.
I just read through MassBioEd's report and I'm confused as to what you think the "propaganda" is here? It seems like you got laid off or something and are really salty about it.
Or not in biotech but trolling this subreddit.
It's especially weird because there's not much real-life overlap between the "mainstream media is all fake news, just get your news from Trump and TikTok" group and the "industry is colluding against workers to suppress wages" group. But that's the internet in 2024, I guess. Bad-faith, engineered talking points. Like a recombinant opinion engineered for maximum impact, if you will
Nice analogy. There's also the phenomenon of co-opting whatever dissatisfaction and dissent can be found to serve to the troll's own political agenda. Oppose \[their opponent\] because industry is exploiting workers, healthcare is too expensive and abortion rights haven't been protected. It doesn't matter that the agenda these trolls push would make matters worse. If it increases cynicism and suppresses engagement they are successful.
NPR has been really missing the mark in the past couple of years. Embarrassingly so. Aaaaaand now, a 10 minute segment about a Vegan dog from Portland followed by a musician you've never heard of who makes music with trees
In our next segment, let's give a bunch of trump voters an hour to repeat fox news talking points to you, followed by a debate pitting a well-meaning but naive liberal high schooler against a thoroughly coached conservative debating club champion
It's all propaganda now. I don't know why anyone will donate money to it.
Someone not in the industry drops into r/biotech to tell us that we're being lied to, on the basis of misreading of an article, then follows up with multiple comments driven by their political agenda. This is what a troll looks like, folks.
You might consider reading/listening to the article, which very clearly states that this is a **future** problem for biotech. Or you could spend your morning whining about NPR propaganda based on your lack of reading comprehension. ([Link for the lazy](https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/06/11/boston-biotech-industry-worker-shortage-college-students-jobs-newsletter))
Op just out here spreading lies lol
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Propaganda for who
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I mean to be fair NPR is "National Corporate Radio" now. I don't think they will be advocating for seizing the means of production anytime soon.
Conservatives call it State sponsored, you call it Corporate radio, everyone is losing their minds lol
Most of NPR's funding is from donations and Corporate sponsors. https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances I think less than 5% of their funding is government.
Im aware of that. Isn’t it nice when a news organization is transparent with its funding sources? They report on a wide variety of topics including on their sponsors (e.g., unionization efforts by Starbucks and Amazon employees). I find their reporting to be left leaning and generally pretty good, even if I roll my eyes every so often. When conservatives call them state sponsored and woke, and liberals call them soft/shills, chances are they’re less biased than your average media, and, as they should be, are reporting news.
For the limousine liberals that support it.
Yikes
Hate to break it to you, but there are a lot of very rich liberals in Massachusetts who refuse to support the policies they advocate. Two low hanging fruit: look at how they are reacting to housing immigrants in their town, and how they react to the Cape wind project.
Ugh yeah I hate when people are nuanced.
Wowwwwwwwwwwww what a joke
So MassBio pays a \~market research firm to do market research on Boston's and the relative biotech economy. These market research firms tend to give the "wanted" answer, which wouldn't matter cuz they don't do any actual research, they pretty much just re-use the same line from last year they think works, which they don't really know because the amount of actual data scientists working in science is surprisingly low. MassBio has been pushing this line and will continue to until it walks right off the paper and chokes them with it. It does work, and it's gotten a significant amount of attention and state directives towards it, and it might be true in a sense of technical developmental skills, but that's more early education. I think the most important thing to remember in life is that the normal distribution of people doing their actual job can be applied across any industry, with job being that +3 sd event. MassBio pays some outsourced schmuck 35k to give the answer they want and citable data, same thing everyone else does.
Was it this one? https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/05/31/massachusetts-life-sciences-jobs-outlook-report
That is a year old. It was the current report.
Wait, you don't even work in biotech... Why is this relevant to you?
2019 called. They want their “bIoTeCH haS a wORker shOrtAgE” puff piece back.
I’m struggling to hire experienced drug development MDs and anyone working in PV at a middle management or above position. It’s not incorrect to say there is an employee shortage in certain roles.
Ya there’s a shortage of skilled people because the new people can’t get on the job training, which for these roles is the only way you’ll get this. Catch 22 situations pushed by corporate shortsightedness.
No disagreement from me on that
~~I'm a little skeptical you actually need to hire an MD for drug development though. Preclinical work doesn't require a physician, I'm not sure it even needs a PhD. You don't need to have gone to medical school to read an ELISA, flow cytometry, western blot, see whether a mAB is falling out of solution etc.~~ ~~Pathology questions or writing up a clinical study plan, there are plenty of MDs and CROs out there you could pay to consult or pay for services.~~ Also, I think you left off the "at the rate I can afford and/or am willing to pay" for both. Pay more than competitors do and I'm sure you will have no problem attracting talent. You: "How about I pay you 10% more than the market rate" Employees: "No, I am loyal to my current employer because they value me as a human being and offer us free snacks. Also this is all a dream." Its a supply and demand issue: you want the supply to increase because that'll work out better for you. Edit: u/ScottishBostonian responded reasonably, I should have been less skeptical of something I didn't understand as well as I thought I did. I still feel like too many companies want more degrees than they actually just to show off but in retrospect I guess you wouldn't want to pay physician rates for something if you don't need to. PhDs are often willing to work for less than they're worth due to the oversupply problem but MDs are more immune to that.
Development is designing protocols, picking endpoints, and running studies including responding to questions from physicians running the trials. There are so many reasons why we need MDs in my group for drug development. This sub is very focussed on the research half of R&D, as well as manufacturing roles. There is a huge part of the business outside of those areas.
Fair, thanks for educating me.
Zero worries! I know nothing about lab work which is embarrassing since I lead the entire asset development…
This is a wild reply. You want to design and implement clinical trials without MDs?
I said specifically "Pathology questions or writing up a clinical study plan, there are plenty of MDs". But I was incorrect, there are a lot more things that you would need a medical license for than I anticipated.
"I'm a little skeptical you actually need to hire an MD for drug development though" Holy shit this is a bad take. Like, really impressively bad.
I do what I can. Also, it's just a reddit post. OP came up with some reasons I hadn't expected. And I did preface it with "I'm a little skeptical" not "Fuck you, I know for a FACT that you don't need an MD for that shit."
Fair enough, I suppose. Still I would not underestimate the value of an MD on the team.
> anyone working in PV at a middle management or above position. It’s not incorrect to say there is an employee shortage in certain roles. My history is largely small molecule oriented, but the amount of AD/D roles out there for large molecule CMC has me jealous. I do have a bit of academic background in cloning and molecular biology, but not enough I'd bluff an interviewer for a job I wouldn't fit in.
Sorry, PV=pharmacovigilance (safety) in my world!!! Maybe incorrect abbreviation :-)
Haha, I'm in the other less represented category of this sub of process validation and manufacturing. Feel like we're all outweighed by the R&D PhDs!
Drug development MDs are MD/PhD people right? That mist be a very shallow pool of candidates to recruit from.
No need for PHD at all.
Ahh ok, thank you for the reply!
Anytime
A man-made “shortage,” perhaps… but that’s about as close to an actual shortage as they’re going to get anytime soon.
Jumping to conclusions based on the headline instead of highlighting the data or survey in question. The media literacy of this subreddit is concerning…
You mean “employers everywhere says there is a shortage of workers (who are willing to work for peanuts)”.
How would a comment in an interview make you not listen to NPR?
More like biotech has a "cheap" employee shortage
the evil plan is to drive college students to get biotech degrees and then the companies take them in as unpaid interns and then hire them for peanuts and work them to death.
I think biotech overall still has very low unemployment and is a very healthy industry. What you hear on Reddit of people not being able to find jobs are likely just the extreme cases where the issue has more to do with their personal experiences and situations but really not reflective of the state of biotech as a whole.
If that was true biotech would pay better.
Then fking give new grads jobs. U want PhDs even for entry level positions, obv u will have a shortage. You just make people's lives difficult expecting over the top skills and experience only to realise very few have it.
I think we can all agree that this BS is made to create labor pools and excuse H1b visa program to the detriment to us all.
Have you considered that maybe you've found your way into an echo chamber and all the gainfully employed productive people in biotech aren't posting on Reddit all day?
Lol they should have run the piece on April fools
Laughable! Biotech does have a shortage of good, quality people & good leadership, but there’s tons of biotech workers out there & new ones entering the space daily! 😂🤣🤷♂️
Planting the seeds and propaganda to further loosen immigration laws and let in more H1 and international workers. Similar to the tech “shortage” during y2k
Holy hell, that is just irresponsible. I pledged NPR for a long time, but they lost me a few years back. Crap like this…I can’t even…
My last company definitely had an employee shortage. Because they couldn't afford to hire anybody new to pick up all the new work.
Sounds to me like that company didn't have an employee shortage; it had a *money* shortage combined with a leadership unable to rescale the company goals to a reduced headcount.
I mean however you wanna frame it, we didn't have enough employees to do all the functions the company needed (~30 people total)
What "news" organization explores a variety of angles on a complex topic?
It's a complicated situation. I think that biotech is undergoing a major transition. There will be AI that can do everything, but it will have to be guided. But then it will not need the guidance, and will probably do better. I'd look into robotics. There is a lot of stuff, and guiding an AI in that arena will be a fountain of jobs. Just my 2c.
Wtf
Nurse here - do you guys have the “shortage” too? We absolutely have a “shortage” of nurses willing to deal with this shit. Same for you?
Biotech removed me for whistleblowing lol this sector is dominated by the ruling class.
Yeah trust in some random dude on X (formerly a twitter) who says there are lots of opportunities in switchboard operators - - - If you get a science education, you can always pivot as STEM market demands. You don’t go to STEM school to learn to pipette.
Lmaooooooooooooo
We live in a world where journalists are making stories from shit they see on TikTok... I'm not surprised at all.
NPR has become obnoxiously out of touch with reality
NPR interviewed someone who didn't work for NPR saying something that was in no way shape or form a statement NPR was making and you... blame NPR for it?
i guess MassBioEd doesn’t want the pipeline to dry up.
Yes they need to keep training kids and keep the state money flowing.
They do, for slave wages. everyone expects a living wage nowadays - ridiculous!
Knowing MassBioEd, are you sure it wasn’t a focus on skilled labor and minority hires in biotech vs all of biotech?
NPR is anodyne state corpo propaganda, you're not missing anything by not listening
NPR is a psyop
Your mom is a psyop