Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Chemist versus plumber


Lots more chemists in the past; lots more plumbers overall. Thanks to Job Voyager for the comparison. 
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23 comments:

  1. AnonymousMay 17, 2011 at 11:35 AM

    So there's way more plumbers than chemists and their jobs are more secure than ours? I missed the boat big time.

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  2. AnonymousMay 17, 2011 at 12:47 PM

    Everyone needs a good plumber sometime and having one down the block is a very good thing. Almost no one ever needs a good chemist and on the off chance you do, you can always dial 1-800-AsianChemists.

    The last plumber I hired charged me 2X my hourly rate as a drug research chemist, plus he gets time and a half pay for anytime past 8 hours and on weekends (and double time on holidays). Those are hours my employer takes out of my hide for free.

    The jobs are kind of the same in that you work with lot of pipes moving fluids and waste about and at the end of the day you both smell like crap.

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  3. See Arr OhMay 17, 2011 at 12:56 PM

    @Anon9:47 - At least plumbers KNOW what's "In The Pipeline"

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  4. azmanamMay 17, 2011 at 1:30 PM

    Yes, I think we've all had this water cooler talk at one time or another. For me in grad school, my coworkers and I would have this talk once a week or so.

    'Why are we doing this to ourselves? Let's just quit and deliver pizzas. Or be a banker. Or lay brick. Or any other thousands of jobs that a) pay better than grad school, b) don't require a BS and c) don't require 60 hrs/wk.'

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  5. milkshakeMay 17, 2011 at 1:37 PM

    get the necessary trade training and land a plumb industry job at Merck.

    For those who complain about the lack of job availability in their specific filed, I would like bring up a story of political castaways in a commie block. All that could get you screwed up was one indiscreet conversation reported by a snitch, that made its way into your personal file. You became unemployable, every time you got even a remotely qualification-related technician job, a phone rung at your new employer and you were on the pavement. The only available job was to sweep the street or shovel coal into a furnace. If you did not take it, they would arrest you and put on trial for being a jobless social parasite. I had both my grandfather and father going through through this "re-education" process, and they pulled through eventually but it took them more a decade of doing really crappy blue collar jobs to work themselves up to a job that was even remotely related to their engineering degree qualifications. (We were not atypical family. About a quarter of population went through a similar experience). And I should also mention that our East-Bloc country was rather small - smaller than Florida. Even without a political blemish, one run out of job options there pretty quickly. You could do any meaningful synthetic chemistry at about two places in the capital (places that had NMR, Chemical Abstratcs andf a decent technical library with western chenmistry journals). If you screwed up there you were finished as a chemist.

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  6. ChemjobberMay 17, 2011 at 1:52 PM

    Fair enough, milkshake. Thankfully, we're not in that situation.

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  7. AnonymousMay 17, 2011 at 2:21 PM

    I remember when it first hit me as though it were yesterday. I landed my one and only job offer working in a drug discovery laboratory at a large pharmaceutical Co. in 1978. There it was $21,000 per year for 23 years of education – a diploma, BS, MS, PhD and a year of post doc. My father who did not graduate from high school because of WWII was an electrician and earning $35,000 at the time which included some overtime pay.

    When I arrived at my new employer certain long-term bench chemists grumbled about my high pay but did not seem to notice that the union person, a high school dropout, delivering the tanks of gas to their laboratories was paid $18,000 per year. I said what hell is going on here? That is when some dopey manager pulled me aside and told me to shut up about pay or else.

    In the same era that I was in college and then earning peanuts as a grad student and post doc, my parent’s home value went from about $35,000 to around $140,000. All the while starting salaries for PhD chemists went from $17,000 to, well, $21,000.

    It was in that year of awaking that I looked into the mirror and said to the guy looking back at me: you are screwed big time! I should have been an electrician.

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  8. AnonymousMay 17, 2011 at 3:24 PM

    the people who come in to the lab to repair lab equipment are paid even better than plumbers. maybe chemists can switch to lab equipment repair.

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  9. ChemjobberMay 17, 2011 at 4:38 PM

    "the people who come in to the lab to repair lab equipment are paid even better than plumbers"

    Hmmmm -- really?

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  10. milkshakeMay 17, 2011 at 5:16 PM

    I have a friend who is a service engineer with Bruker. He is on the road 5 days a week and as a chemistry MS he brings home 65-70 k including the overtime

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  11. AnonymousMay 17, 2011 at 5:39 PM

    My NMR repair tech billed his labor and travel at $295 per hour. Assuming 75% is overhead that is about $150,000 per year for a 40 hour work week.

    Still that is much cheaper than the $700 per hour my IP lawyer charges.

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  12. bad wolfMay 17, 2011 at 5:40 PM

    On the plus side we seem to have much less gender disparity, if i read the graphs right. So why do we have so many people telling us to 'balance' it even more? Shouldn't they be breathing down plumbing's neck?

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  13. ChemjobberMay 17, 2011 at 6:09 PM

    Huh. I suspect that there's different pay rates for different instrumentation, with NMR techs at the top and GC techs at the bottom. Dunno.

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  14. milkshakeMay 17, 2011 at 6:40 PM

    it is typical for NMR companies to make you pay through the nose, and take their blessed time, if you do not have a service contract with them. From what I heard Bruker pays less than Varian and has fewer field service engineers (but somehow still manages to employ better qualified engineers overall). His 65-70k was before taxes, and I know this quite well because he was my friend and few years ago we were trying to hire him away from Bruker - to become our spectroscopist, and salary level of course came up. I should mention that he had a long previous academic experience in isolation and NMR elucidation of marine natural compounds, and he was first-rate as an engineer.

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  15. AnonymousMay 17, 2011 at 6:59 PM

    My HPLC repair tech was billed out at $275 per hour. Assuming 75% overhead that is about $140,000 per year for a 40 hour work week.

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  16. ChemjobberMay 17, 2011 at 7:05 PM

    I'm beginning to suspect a couple of things: 1) somebody (I dunno who) here is making a lot of money and/or 2) the techs don't work a 40 hour work week and/or 3) there aren't very many traveling repair techs.

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  17. AnonymousMay 17, 2011 at 7:14 PM

    They probably are not out on calls 40 hours a week, so the overhead number is higher than the standard 75%. Alternatively, they are getting ripped off by their employer.

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  18. milkshakeMay 17, 2011 at 8:17 PM

    @4:14 ..alternatively, they are getting ripped off their employer

    Which one do you think is more likely?

    Some time ago, our analytical Agilent HPLC got problems with leaky check valves because no-one replaced them for a long time and they got worn out. I did not want the headache of maintaining HPLC that was somebody else' responsibility (I would go as far as exchange spent UV lamp in the detector to make it operational again, but I thought I would call Agilent tech support to send an engineer to do the reset). First of all, they wanted to bill us just for speaking on the phone with tech support and asking for a quote. When the maintenance quote came, they wanted fifty one hundred US$ just for a routine maintenance visit. They refused to itemize the repair cost ("we don't have a crystal ball"...). So I asked them for an itemized bill to replace leaky check valves and informed them that we will cancel the already approved purchases and will not buy anything from them in the future if just routine maintenance is so astronomical, and we could get surely a better deal with Shimadzu. The new checkvalve service bill came to $700 including labor, the parts were less than $250. So I ordered the checkvalves by the catalog # and put them in by myself. A garage mechanic that takes your engine out and disassembles your transmission then asks you for five grands is IMHO a paragon of integrity compared to Agilent technical support service...

    All this was about rich and ignorant industry folks who are happy to solve any inconvenience by throwing thousands on it. What Agilent folks were really pushing for was a service contract - they pitched hard to have us sign up for mere 5k per year and instrument and don't you know we would save so much money by that.

    Then there is an experience with the Agilent Potemkin village, their so-called LC/MS that works for only about 1 day after the installation engineer leaves... They are perfectly happy to sell you a system that never got the bugs out of the MS part, and soon there is a software crash or the MS sensitivity goes to hell. They hope that the customers give up trying to get it fixed and the warranty eventually runs out...

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  19. AnonymousMay 17, 2011 at 8:23 PM

    Wow, that's only up to the year 2000, imagine 2010...

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  20. AnonymousMay 18, 2011 at 4:18 AM

    I don't know the details of the occupational classification scheme, but is it possible that the definition of chemist has narrowed over time as other specialisms emerged, such as biochemist? This would exaggerate the decline in chemists, unless corrected for in the analysis.

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  21. CarmenMay 18, 2011 at 10:48 AM

    I never thought to look into what instrument repair workers get paid. But I can tell you I got depressed looking at what folks who repair the DC Metro escalators and elevators make. (All three escalators at my nearest Metro stop stop working for a goodly portion of the year).
    http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/5764/what-do-metro-employees-really-make/

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  22. AnonymousMay 18, 2011 at 8:14 PM

    No, you don't want to be a repair person working for Agilent. You start your own business and compete with the vendors by charging 20% less than their ungodly rates. That's $200/hr for you.

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  23. milkshakeMay 19, 2011 at 12:45 AM

    I know of a guy who does compete successfully with Bruker. One day a water main broke at the nearby construction site and we had NMR room in the basement flooded knee-high. We lost two probes, preamplyfier, several circuit boards at the bottom of the console went bust, etc. His reaction was "I can guess what you need" He dropped everything he was doing, loaded his truck with spare parts and he drove down from Boston right away, while the room was still being pumped, and in one week after the flood our NMR was running and fully functional again. He fixed it faster than our facility dudes came around to lay a new carpet... He was not expensive either, I think he charged about 80k for the whole repair (and that included a new probe, preamplyfier, cables and quite a few other parts)

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20

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