Developing a network of contacts is often cited as career advice to chemists. Sometimes, LinkedIn is suggested as a good service for doing so. A recent post describing why one user quit LinkedIn altogether got me thinking about how useful this service is in practice. An older D-F post talked about some problems with LinkedIn forums - specifically, the limitations of investing time and effort on closed discussion forums with a limited audience.

This year’s Employment Outlook by C&EN states what by now has become perfectly obvious to every chemist - the job market stinks. As if that weren’t enough, the story Barely Hanging On stands as probably the most pessimistic piece the magazine has published in the last few decades.

Chemjobber asks the intriguing question of whether U.S. pharma jobs lost to offshoring will ever be brought back. Recent actions by certain large companies have hinted at manufacturing capacity being brought back to the United States, a process sometimes called “reshoring”. High-profile examples include General Electric and Apple.

Let’s face it, chemistry isn’t cool. If there were a high school in which professions were individuals, Chemistry would be the strange-smelling, socially inept, inscrutable geek who sits in the corner of every class designing smoke bombs. His only friends would be the equally-unpleasant Nuclear Energy, Big Tobacco, and Big Oil.

I rarely discuss personal details on this blog, but See Ar Oh’s Chem Coach Carnival seems like too much fun to pass up. The idea is for chemists to answer a few questions about their jobs and how they got there, with the aim of inspiring chemists and chemists-to-be. Although there are a few popular chemistry career paths, I hope what follows illustrates one of the many ways to do something different.

The chart was compiled from American Chemical Society (ACS) audited financial statements for the years 2007-2011. For ACS income over the same period, see the preceding post in this series. To give some perspective, total ACS revenues in 2011 stood at $499.8 million and expenses totalled $479.9 million.

The chart above was compiled from American Chemical Society (ACS) audited financial statements for the years 2007-2011. Regardless of how you view ACS, one thing is undeniable: “Electronic Services” are a huge and growing part of the annual ACS income. The graph above is shown in percentage terms. To give some perspective, total ACS revenues in 2011 stood at $499.8 million. Electronic services made up 81% of that total, or $403.8 million.

Sublime Text has many features that make it my favorite text editor for Mac. One of them is split view. Having a test suite on the left and its corresponding source file on the right is so much more efficient for test-driven development than tabbing between tests and source files. This system works especially well when multiple test suites and corresponding source files are involved - tests can go on the left and source files on the right.

Reddit Chemistry hosts an interesting discussion about which programming language is most useful to learn as a chemist. This is an important question as chemists everywhere come face-to-face with the worst job market on record. Combining a good chemistry background with a useful skill such as computer programming would be one strategy for staying prepared for whatever lies ahead.

Compared to many areas of computer science, cheminforamtics is a backwater. Consider our “standard” file formats Molfile and SD File. These formats, collectively referred to as “CTfile Formats” were first described in the peer review literature in 1992, and had been in use for years prior to that.

About four years ago I speculated that JavaScript may be capable of filling some important holes in chemistry software.