I think this is true for chemists with a lot of experience, but starting out in the field is brutal for most. Finishing your undergrad and realizing the most you can make is around $35k/year doing basic lab rat work is tough. The only other options are to go to grad school or leave the field entirely. The grad school route offers another 4 to 6 years of low pay and then possibly having to go through a post doc to ultimately land a job paying 80-100k/year. Tack on the student loan debt (from undergrad) and it paints a bleak picture.

Background: I studied chemistry as an undergrad and started a PhD after an internship at Merck. I couldn't see how I could support my family long term so I switched to tech.

the idea that chemistry is not part of tech is a big part of the problem

It is not. Chemistry is just a special sub-field of manufacturing. Nearly all manufacturing uses chemistry in some way. But in general manufacturing has nowhere near margins of "tech".

if you are starting from the assumption that drug development and other such research chemistry is 'just a special subfield of manufacturing' then obviously you are not going to come to any sensible conclusions, and i am sure your errors are widespread

I suppose they think pharma is going to find their AI talent off the street and compete with MS, etc.

I agree! When I started my PhD I wanted to use software to help sift through the ocean of research papers and pair that with micro fluidics to create a way to quickly determine the validity of novel reactions. None of the professors were interested in working with me on something like that.

i didn't mean 'the idea that chemistry is not part of software'

'tech' is short for 'technology' in the oed's sense 1b, 'practical arts collectively', for which their first citation is from 01859, referring to, as it happens, chemistry; specifically, the formulation of varnishes for wood

https://archive.org/details/oed9barch/page/n548/mode/1up

possibly also the second half of their sense 1a, '... the scientific study of the practical or industrial arts,' for which i think the first citation is from bentham in 01802–12

obviously in the 19th century they weren't talking about software

your idea is good though

i hope you do it

> the idea that chemistry is not part of tech is a big part of the problem

How so?

A software developer who earned a Bachelor's in chemistry once told me that he didn't find that the pay in chemistry was worthwhile considering the expertise and training involved. He said that the most available job for chemical research for someone with a Bachelor's was as a lab technician, which roughly earns about $40,000 USD a year: not bad, but far below an engineering or computer science graduate, despite the comparable difficulty for completing the degree.

For chemists who complete a doctorate, a brief search shows that a PhD graduate (after 4–7+ years of low pay as a graduate student after a Bachelor's) can plausibly earn about $125,000 USD with some luck as a starting salary as a scientist in industry. A Master's graduate can likely earn close to that. But I've heard that the job market is tougher for research positions—a fair number of people switch into other fields such as medical device sales and sales engineering (with eye-wateringly large salaries of plausibly greater than $400,000 USD a year from what I've heard), data science, or software.

But careers aren't only about the money, though. It sounds like the author of the submitted article has lived a fulfilling life without a primary focus on salary, and it certainly looks like people who enjoy chemistry research won't struggle financially for their efforts. However, there's still a salary gap, especially at the level of a Bachelor's: it looks clear that other fields pay a lot more for similar amounts of effort. Note that I lack personal experience in this field, though—people who have gone through this path likely have better, more specific insights about the career.

In the US, chemistry is a very saturated field. There are nearly twice as many graduates as job openings each year. Starting pay averages are on par with a grocery store cashier.

Interesting. And https://www.acs.org/education/policies/acs-approval-program/... also says that chemistry has about equal numbers of men and women graduating.

Other stem fields that pay more, tend to have more men. (I will not speculate about causes. I'm only noticing a correlation.)

Sure, I suppose you might say that if a field is welcoming to more workers then it's more likely to become saturated. I'm not sure if that's where you're going but, it makes some sense.

That said, I think it's more likely that loan incentives for STEM majors have steered too many people into job skills that aren't in demand because education and education policy both lag far behind industry.

Policy making is almost always slower than economic flux by an exponential margin. That's why capitalism works for decades and centuries longer than other more policy dependent economic systems.

Oh well... The beauty of life is you can change your mind and make a career in anything you can figure out. Well, unless you are already carrying $50k in student debt that can't be dismissed through bankruptcy, like many chem grads are in the US. We can thank the government for helping us decide on a STEM degree.

Some will argue that we signed up for it, so we should have to pay it. But, that makes no sense. The FTC is there to protect consumers who get sold on bad loans and false claims of benefits.

Who is protecting students? I think that's the bigger issue, if we're talking about chemistry in the US.

No, they generally do not.