Ask HN: How to transition into Biotech?

[mactavish88]

Can anyone perhaps recommend any strategies/approaches for transitioning into biotech, without having had any experience specifically in biotech?

I’ve personally been working at non-FAANG companies across several different industries for 15 years, recently in team lead roles, mostly in the open source arena. Most recently in a project lead role, which I don’t enjoy too much.

[mardiyah]

Explore few prominent (organic) chemistry softwares in intensive depth eg:

Chemdraw for creating organic chemical structures, schemes, diagrams/figures, which can be exported to other programs

SciFinder and Reaxys for searching the chemical literature and doing background research

Gaussview and Gaussian09 to submit and run DFT or ab initio calculations on molecules

MestReNova / MestRec

[anonymouskimmer]

I'm in biotech but I'm not a programmer. Have you looked at job listings to see where your experience parallels and where it doesn't?

From what I've seen many of the programmers with biotech experience don't really have a good understanding of what we do in the lab. Communication is really important.

[mactavish88 → anonymouskimmer]

Where’s a good place to find job listings, and where, geographically, is all the interesting biotech work currently happening?

I’ve tried the standard places where I’d search for non-biotech jobs (and there are craploads of those types of jobs listed), but barely any biotech jobs come up e.g. on LinkedIn. Maybe because I’m in Canada?

[anonymouskimmer → mactavish88]

To start here's a website with a map of a bunch of biotech-related companies. Click on the dots located in Canada to see the names of these companies, and then search their websites (or search them on the likes of LinkedIn) for computational job listings.

https://www.biotech-careers.org/employer-locations-world

For Canada it looks like Toronto, and then Vancouver and Montreal.