Today is one of those days when I would happily give back half of my pay to return to academics.  Since starting this blog I have waxed rhapsodic about the fabulous world of chemical industry and along the way have hazed and taunted the cloistered world of academia.  Being in industry is like being in the engine room of a ship.  There is comfort in the steady thrumming of the engines and not a little excitement in the scale and power of the thing.

But industry offers a great deal in the way of discomfort as well. Whereas career buoyancy in academia is based on at least some pretense of meritocracy, moving up the pecking order in industry is a more complicated affair.  A productive academic can expect to become tenured and finally promoted to full professor after time in service with some grants, a book, committee work, or a handfull of papers, assuming the student evaluations aren’t too bad.

In industry, it is more about “what have you done for me lately”? Even if you do your best and make progress, there is no assurance that upper level management won’t cancel the project. 

In large corporations, plum jobs are subject to project cancellation or redundancy after a merger.  You can be making great progress on a project and suddenly the word comes down that your division is about to be sold or there is to be a reorganization.  Budgets, requisitions, and staffing are all frozen.  Then the call for early retirements comes out.  Finally, the first wave of layoffs arrives.  If you are a survivor, you are chastened by the experience and resolve to make the company work or die trying.

Eventually you discover that you could work 24/7 and still, your destiny is entirely in the hands of others. Then one morning you are called to a conference room and a sober member of HR has an announcement.  Everyone in the room is to be let go and out of the building by noon. There is a dreadful silence as people attempt to digest what was just said.  You feel the room close in around you and there is a metallic tang on the sides of your tongue. Confusion turns to panic and then to anger. How could they do this?

The HR person drones on about benefits, COBRA, and then reveals that the modest severance package has strings.  In exchange for silence and a clean separation, you will be offered two weeks of pay per year of service as “the package”.

So, you sign the paper and drop off your security card as you leave the room.  As you pack your things into the boxes they have thoughtfully provided, you begin to wonder just how you will make ends meet.  Not 2 hours earlier, you were immersed in the technical details of your project.  How things can change in just a few heartbeats.

Another pickle the mid-career chemist may encounter is the “Golden Handcuffs” scenario.  There are many variations of this phenomenon, but I’ll describe the variation I’m most familiar with.

As you climb the career ladder, you naturally climb the salary scale.  As your salary increases you find that your lifestyle develops expenses that closely match your income.  Eventually, you find that you can’t afford to leave because the starting salary elsewhere is lower. Unless you can be hired in elsewhere at your senior salary, you’re pretty much stuck.

At some point the company finds itself beset with a lot of expensive middle aged managers who will continue to draw heavy salaries for the remainder of their career. So, not only does a mid-career professional face the Golden Handcuffs, but they have a big target on their back during hard financial times at the company.  Mid-career can be a very treacherous time with dangerous shoals to navigate.