Reply #66: Ph.D.s are being outsourced, too

[Timbuk3]

I have a friend who has a Ph.D. and a Harvard Med School post-doc. The company he applied to was open about the fact that half their Ph.D. staff is in China.

He didn't get the job. They told him they filled the position with an "internal candidate".

You figure it out.

Meanwhile, I've had a job search agent active on the American Chemical Society website for several months. While he was sitting next to me I opened the last two emails sent by this agent.

The first contained 5 job leads. 3 were in India.

The second contained a single job lead for a position in India.

Janitor is one of the few positions that can't be outsourced. You need a long mop to scrub a floor in America when you're in Asia.

With that preface, may I present this story from the San Diego Union Tribune?

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/biotech/20061126-9999-1n26biotech.html

The business of biotechnology is undergoing a seismic shift, and for some companies there's no surviving the jolt.

Take Discovery Partners International. The San Diego company ceased to exist in September, a victim of trends that are reshaping the biotech industry and, at least in the short term, threatening innovation and job creation in the nation's third-largest biotech cluster.

Increasingly, the venture capitalists who fund new life-science companies are shopping for existing drugs to refine instead of backing scientists to make discoveries. When startups are created, they're often minimally staffed. More drug companies are farming out research work to scientists in China, India and Eastern Europe, where tasks are done more cheaply.

"Get an education" isn't such hot advice any more, either.

What comes after "post-doctoral fellow"?