To scientists considering working in industry: Size matters

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Students often ask my advice to help them choose between pursuing a career in industry or academia. I think they expect me to hit on the standard comparisons: purity versus security, intellectual freedom versus monetary freedom, teaching versus never freaking having to teach again. But I always begin my answer somewhere else: by telling them that they’re asking a flawed question. Industry, I tell them, isn’t just one thing. And understanding the different types is crucial.

We often think of “industry” as Fortune 500 tech companies with fancy offices and, I don’t know, canapés or something. But there’s big industry, and there’s small industry. And the difference between them can be as vast as the difference between industry and academia.

For more than a decade, I worked at a small startup biotech company. We were nimble, scrappy, innovative, poor, and in a constant panic. Those qualities became the backbones of the company culture. Folks who came to us straight from academia seemed to understand what they had gotten themselves into. But scientists who had previously held a job in large industry quickly found themselves confused.

I remember packing a shipment of our experimental product to send to a clinical trial site. A new member of our quality assurance (QA) team, fresh from a job at a big company, oversaw the process, and once the shipment was ready to go, she asked, “And now we give it to the shipping team?” I shared a look with the other scientist who had helped pack the shipment, and we chuckled.

“Uh, no,” I said. “We’re also the shipping team.”

The new QA person was then shocked to see the same scientists who had performed research and development, analyzed clinical data, maintained inventory, and led parts of the manufacturing process walk the shipment down the hallway to the freight elevator. Then she was even more shocked when we transported it to the loading dock, wheeled it across the parking lot, and hoisted it into the back seat of my Saturn.

I was a molecular biologist, but some days, I was also a courier.

And I was on the sales team. And triaged CVs and interviewed job candidates. And helped our regulatory team prepare documents. And performed quality control assays. And edited publications. And ran the holiday gift exchange. And was, for a decent stretch of time, in charge of watering half of the office plants.

I say all of this not to boast about the breadth of my abilities (though I will say that those office plants absolutely thrived), but because everyone at the company wore that many hats. When something needs to get done, and you only have a few dozen employees, one of you needs to do it.

I still remember a day in 2012 when the CEO plopped a binder on my desk. It contained hundreds of pages about applying for a particular grant. “You’re in charge of this now,” he said. “It’s due in a month.” I didn’t even need to ask whether I was in charge of the grant instead of my normal duties. I already knew the answer.

That’s the horror, and the glory, of working for a small company. You get to experience so much more than one tiny role. You feel like you’re integral to the mission, and if you can solve a problem—whether using your brain or your Saturn—you can often just go for it.

On the other hand, you lack the security, and the established systems, of a large employer. Nothing is guaranteed, which means everything is on fire all the time. I remember arriving at work one day and telling my team we had five dire crises to tackle that day—and we never got to start because a few minutes later, someone ran in and demanded we drop everything and solve a sixth crisis.

It also means you have no shipping team, or anything team, so you have no experts to address certain issues, just whoever has bandwidth. We collaborated on that grant application with a few large institutions, and when they sent me their pages, it was clear they had been assembled by teams whose jobs, whose careers, were built around producing sleek, comprehensive, successful grant applications. We didn’t have that. We had … me. And we only had me on the side, in addition to my other work.

The night before the grant was due, two other volun-told employees—our attorney and our chief financial officer—brought the grant application to Kinko’s to print the required number of copies. But when I came in the next morning, a few crucial formatting errors were discovered, touching off a frenzied flurry of trying to reprint thousands of pages on every printer the company owned so we could somehow physically submit the application by 5 p.m. (You may wonder why the granting agency wouldn’t just accept a digital copy. So did we.)

With half an hour to go, we had printed 3.5 of the required 10 copies, and we started sending people down the highway in shifts. The first to arrive would turn in the three complete copies and try to persuade the granting agency to wait just a little bit longer while the remaining copies churned out of the printers. Then a second car, then a third, would scream down the highway in the hopes that the first was still holding the proverbial door open with their foot.

By the end of that day, we were exhausted from constant activity, and the granting agency did receive everything—albeit piecemeal, and with a caution from them that they may or may not accept the application.

Months later, we learned we were not awarded the grant. I probably would have felt worse about the outcome if, when I heard the news, I hadn’t been superbusy doing 50 other things.

That’s small industry. It’s a constant battle to achieve something important against the backdrop of dwindling resources, and some days you love that dynamic, and some days, not so much.

I’ve also had a brief taste of large industry, the summer I did an internship at a multithousand-worker pharma company. What were our main products, you ask? I have no idea. The company was so large that it didn’t even make sense to ask such questions. That would be like asking an academic scientist what sort of work the European History Department has been doing.

Every day I worked in my lab, with a small team, researching and developing our own project. And that was it. No one was going to plop a folder on my desk and declare, “Now you’re in charge of health insurance!” Working at a company with 50 employees is very different from working at a company with 50 buildings.

If you’re debating whether to pursue a career in industry, take the time to consider that the choice is more complicated than “yes” or “no.” Maybe you’d rather do a little bit of everything to contribute toward a well-defined mission, or maybe you’d rather work in a lab on an interesting project where no one will distract you with grant applications or plants to water.

Just don’t pursue a job in one, thinking it’s the other. And take the bus to work so no one makes you deliver anything.

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