Hacker News Reader

Comment by PlasmonOwl | Hacker News Reader

You are completely right. I am a chemist and this isn’t a self indulgent rant but there are those who “get” chemistry and those who don’t. We can teach and train a chemist to work in a lab - but one who groks it? Difficult to create. Sadly, there are scant opportunities for glory in chemistry. Salaries are usually low, issues with mental health are rampant, and it’s generally a career of high suffering. (For a white collar role) Many of us regret our choice, because we all feel like Walter White, funnily enough. Talented, but little to show for it. Most of us don’t start cooking though

View on HN

> Salaries are usually low, issues with mental health are rampant, and it’s generally a career of high suffering. (For a white collar role)

Are you specifically referring to grad school and work in academia, or is this very location specific for people who've started their career? Because I know tons of chemists who went into industry after their Ph.D and they earn on the high side of overall STEM degrees.

Pharma, polymer producers, chemical bulk goods, petro, ... They all pay 6-figure salaries before mid-career. Of course it's not FAANG, but it's very comfortable.

So either my chemistry friends purposely got skills in grad school that transfer well into industry, or the German language region has unusually strong pharma/chemical industry.

I would say your last point. Chemical field is of extraordinarily high status in Germanic countries. Its like math for Francophones last century. (People learning the language for the field) Merkel? Angewandte Chemie? BASF? Not sure if that will last thanks to a lot of it based on fossil fuels.

> We can teach and train a chemist to work in a lab - but one who groks it?

This happens a lot in mature fields. Mechanics generally can't design cars. Doctors generally can't come up with drugs. IT staff can't generally write software. Pilots can't generally design aeroplanes. Homeowners can't generally build houses. The operator/builder split is real!

Aren't your examples also true about immature fields?

Very few doctors have every come up with drugs.

Few of the early pilots after the Wrights designed their own airplanes, but airplanes were certainly not mature by 1912.

When did home building change from an immature field to a mature one? I struggle to think of when most homeowners built houses.

Saying "IT staff can't generally write software" sounds like saying "sailors can't generally pilot a large vessel" - both are specialized abilities in a larger field.

> Saying "IT staff can't generally write software" sounds like saying "sailors can't generally pilot a large vessel" - both are specialized abilities in a larger field.

I'm not saying they aren't. That's why I said that there's a gap between build and operate.

It still has nothing to do with the maturity of the field.

How many astronauts could design a rocket that could get to space? I believe the answer is zero, irrespective of maturity.

Yeah, that’s it.

I didn’t "get" chemistry back in my school days and it was a real frustration because, well, of course I had bad grades but what saddened me were that I still found the topic to be very interesting and I loved physics, which I was pretty good at and I could see how the two were magically interconnected. But I failed to grasp the "logic" behind the system.

That’s truly one of my regrets because chemistry is probably one of the most important fundamental science for humanity’s future.

But that’s ok, I love computer science too and I did "get" it (mostly). Thanks for the awesome semiconductors, chemists !

The way chemistry is taught in schools isn't very logic in a lot of ways – it's based on heuristics. It's mostly some empirical rules, but if feels like you have more exceptions from those rules than real applications. The reasons are that 1) each molecule is a complex and complicated quantum mechanical system and 2) each observable unit of chemistry (one or more substances and their transitions in reactions or change of state) is a thermodynamic system with complex statistics. Highschoolers - not unlike alchemists - lack the math to describe these problems, so they are taught heuristics that are useful in understand a lot (but not all) everyday-chemistry.

Your phrase “logic behind the system” resonates with me. I loved and thrived in organic chemistry but it took hours and hours of sitting working through syntheses over and over-pulling books off library shelves looking for more examples. When things clicked it was beautiful. Many of my pre-med classmates were determined to memorize their way out of it, and I pleaded with them that it was impossible. It’s not list of parameters it is a way of thinking and more complex pattern recognition. They were likely busy with other pre-med stuff and had to allocate time elsewhere. I ended up pursuing microbiology/molecular biology as I didn’t have the financial runway to switch or expand majors at that point in my life, no regrets but I loved the logic of chemistry and probably could have led to some cool things had I done both.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com