San Diego job postings: Crinetics and others

From my Twitter mentions, Crinetics is now looking for experienced medicinal chemists.

(You know, I get the real sense that Sorrento Valley is a more happenin' place than it was ~7 years ago; I hope that's true.)

Also, I would love love love love to know the story behind this API manufacturing supervisor (?) ad in the San Diego Craigslist. Why does it need a B.S. in chemistry? 

Wanna work for free in San Diego?

I assume this sort of informal exchange is probably more common than is understood. But still:

Medicinal chemist (Torrey Pines) 

A San Diego biotech start up is looking for a hands-on medicinal chemist to synthesize small molecule heterocyclic drug candidates. The successful candidate will have had several years or more of experience in the lab, preferably in industry, and be able to search literature to create synthetic plans and extract relevant schemes and procedures. In addition, the successful candidate will need to know how to run samples and interpret NMR and LC-MS data. 

The company does not currently have funding, although we have applied for several grants and expect responses in the near future. Until the company is financed, salary will be paid in the form of company stock. (Emphasis CJ's) This is an excellent opportunity to get into a very promising start-up at the ground level. 

If interested, please send me a copy of your resume, and any questions you have about the company. 

Good heavens. (Thanks to reader IH for spotting this gem.)

UPDATE: From the comments, proof that I have excellent and very knowledgeable readers:

Advice for jobseekers looking for startup work (particularly aimed at this position):

1) Don't be enamoured with the number of zeroes in your stock amount. Know how many shares are outstanding and calculate the percent ownership of the company. If you are in "at the ground floor" and no pay as this guy says, you should probably be looking at double digit ownership. It could be up to 50% depending on how much experience you bring and how many partners are already on board. 

2) Find out what kind of stock you have. There are different types of stock and stock options. Make sure you get founders stock in this case. The differences are in payout order. When investors come in and you have regular employee stock options, you don't get paid until everyone who put money in gets their original investment. Founders stock puts you somewhere at the front of the line. 

3) Make sure your "strike price" is almost zero. The strike price is what you pay for options. Some places will make you pay that up front, some will subtract the original strike price from your future earnings. Figure out what your plan is. 

4) Make sure you negotiate your eventual salary and put everything in writing. If this is a good potential company, make sure you decouple the stock from your eventual salary. Based on the statistic that most startups fail within a few years, cash in hand is always worth more than the promise of future stock.

Thank you, Anon051020120900 -- I am honored that you're reading my blog.

San Diego Job Market Update, Feb. 2010 to current

As some may remember, I have an occasional series where I look at the San Diego job market for chemists by looking at the number of job ads in the San Diego regional ACS newsletter. While not perfectly diagnostic, it is one means of measuring whether or not the job market is improving. From the most recent data (November 2010 through February 2011), things don't look great.

That being said, I have my typical caveats about this measurement: 1) the deep of winter doesn't seem to be a prime time for employers to look for employees, 2) while the ACS Newsletter has (in the past) been a traditional place for San Diego biotechs to look for chemists, they could be going elsewhere and 3) this sort of decline could be cyclical or secular, and we just don't know.

San Diego Chemistry Job Market: 2009-2010 update

chemjobber.blogspot.com

It's been a while since I've looked at the San Diego job market for chemists; by this measure, things aren't going so hot. The local ACS section for San Diego has a newsletter that typically contains job ads for local companies; I tabulated the current issue and the twelve issues before. As usual, there's all sorts of reasons why this data could be wrong; nevertheless, it's what's available to be measured easily.

As you can see, it's been slim pickings, including a number of months where there were no ads at all. In addition, the number of ads is nowhere near the recordable peak achieved in May of 2008. Best of luck to all out there looking for work. Sorry I can't report better news.

San Diego Job Market: an update

To answer Derek's question in terms of the San Diego biotech industry (I know that he was focusing on the SF Bay Area), it ain't looking good, with the number of job ads in the San Diego local ACS section newsletter staying flat. Again, I'm aware that this is a poor proxy at best for the overall state of the California biotech economy, but it's what I got.

San Diego: A measurement of the quality of the local job market

The local ACS section publishes a monthly newsletter with job listings. I've taken the time to tabulate all the newsletters that I could find, starting in August of 2006. Below is a graph of the number of ads by month. 

If you would have asked me what the job market was like in San Diego for chemists, I would have told you that it sucked. I regret to inform myself that, well, looking at this chart, it wasn't that bad and that I was applying (since 2/08) right through one of the summer peaks. 

I suppose that it would be nice to have some data from 2004 or 2005, but it looks pretty steady. Older San Diego hands have told me that the market's been bad for awhile here -- I believe them.

Upshot: not as bad as I would have guessed. Still, not a perfect measurement of the chemistry job market. More work to do, I guess. 

P.S. If anyone has a similar means of measuring for other job markets (or hotbeds, as Biospace would have it), let me know in the comments.