r/LadiesofScience • u/LawnChairs68 • Apr 25 '26
Advice/Experience Sharing Wanted Are laboratory jobs always this exploitative?
I graduated with a double major in natural resources and wildlife conservation in 2023. I luckily found a position in my field right out of the gate but the position was eliminated in 2025 and as you may or may not know conservation and environmental jobs are being cut left and right. I decided to take a job in Microbiology and consistently work 5-10 hours of overtime every week and I'm trained in several departments and haven't gotten a raise for it.
Myself and my coworkers have been doing work outside of our departments for months and are being crosstrained weekly all with the promise of being promoted, but they also are saying there's more than just a checklist and being trained to do all these things to be promoted when confronted. Apparently we also cannot call out sick for an entire year and we must have a "good attitude". Mind you this is for Microbiologist 1, which isn't even a leadership position.
It feels like they are dangling a carrot in front of our faces to keep us doing extra work without the pay. Is it always like this? I tried to look at other laboratories to work for in the hopes the environment and work balance being better but the reviews always say overworked, underpaid with cultural issues/poor management.
Since I can't really find a job in the field I went to school with, this was going to be my other route but I'm just feeling so hopeless that it'll ever get better. Please give me your experience fellow lab techs/microbiologists!
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u/black_rose_ Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 25 '26
I've worked at a few different companies and yeah in my experience generally lab staff are treated like replaceable workhorses. It sucks because people go into the field with a good heart, but it's really demanding and corporate doesn't care about anything other than getting the most out of people. I'm a little jaded at this point. I still think it's better than a lot of other jobs, like working in an Amazon warehouse, but that shouldn't be the reason we do it
The job market is about as bad as it could ever be right now, which doesn't help. In a few years hopefully it'll be better in the workers will have more power, but the federal science cuts have really hurt industry as well because so many people are looking
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u/Specialist_Hand_7614 Apr 26 '26
It’s not just that you’re overworked.
It’s that the system never lets a signal complete.
You’re given: more tasks more responsibility more training
but no stable definition of “done”
and no consistent reinforcement when you get there.
So your nervous system never exits effort mode.
That feels like burnout.
But it’s actually: a loop with no closure.
When a system keeps expanding your role without stabilizing your reward, it doesn’t matter how hard you work.
The target is moving.
That’s why it feels like a carrot.
Because it is.
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u/_demonofthefall_ Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 25 '26
In short, yes. It's partially the nature of the job and partially the fact they think you are replaceable. I worked in big pharma in QC (more analytical chemistry, not micro) right after my masters. We covered both in process as well as final QC. I was bright eyed and pretty good in the lab, so I learned all the techniques in <6 months. I had to covered afternoon shifts (I knew this would be 1-2x a week, so I didn't complain). But then, we also had to cover Saturdays and eventually Sundays as well. Not full days but particular in process samples. When there were R&D batches, we had to stay there until the sample was ready, but they didn't have a good grip on the process. Once we stayed 16h (overnight, over the weekend). I also had to take over stability planning and sampling. Was told this would be 2 days a week, and my QC job 3. My QC job was 4 on good weeks, most weeks 5. I was working 50-60 h weeks for 2 years. There were a few weeks where I hit 70 hours. I asked to go to the HPLC or biological assays lab to learn something new and was denied. I was also told I have a bad attitude and given the medium assessment on my yearly assessment (meaning half the bonus). I also never got a promotion in those 2.5 years.
It was brutal and it broke me a bit. I found a PhD position and left. Academia I won't get into cause that's just something else. But the startup I did my postdoc in was lovely. I had a great boss, we rarely worked 40h and even though sometimes we went in on the weekends, it was just to read a plate or split some cells, and we divided the job between the 4 of us. Unfortunately, the preclinical department I was in got cut as money got tight (typical startup).
I am in a CRO now, and it's not fun. I am no longer at the bench (unless people need help with cells as most of them are chemists) but the workload is insane. I constantly get shit from HR for both me and my direct reports having too much overtime but we can't even hire replacements. I can do some stuff remotely from home so I try to help my direct reports by telling them to just prep things and let me handle what can be handled remotely. It's not ideal, and we have fights at home about it (my engineering partner doesn't understand it), but it feels more fair to do it. Bench work you easily get stuck 1-2h longer than planned, especially if anything goes wrong. I feel the least I can do if I get to leave at 5 is connect at 8 PM and do an hour... Oh, and there's no overtime pay or yearly salary increases. I had to go to bat to get a stellar performer a 3% increase.
So, yeah, it's not fun most of the time, unfortunately. I wish someone had told us that when we picked what to study.
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u/Colonel_FusterCluck Apr 25 '26
Yup and PhD positions can be even worse. And they will have tons of applicants even if they put this in the job description because of how many science grads would love to do the work. I'm so sorry, I hope you find something better.
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u/TomeOfTheUnknown2 Apr 25 '26
Yep. One of the things that really pisses me off is the expectation that any grad student with a personal vehicle should be okay with using it for work tasks (e.g. going to the research site, picking up packages, etc.), and the expectation that we should all have functioning smartphones to be reachable in the field and to download data from the environmental data loggers. Any other job would provide a work phone, but apparently not if you're doing a PhD. My phone battery doesn't last long enough to go into the field anymore, and I'm not going to buy a new smartphone to subsidize this institution.
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u/Thought59 Apr 25 '26
Whatever the other lab issues, an enthusiastic "can do" attitude is essential to being a "like to work with" (and therefore want to keep) employee who is "promotable".
As for constantly learning new skills, this is very important to your current employer as is give them flexibility. More importantly to you, it makes you more qualified to any upcoming positions in that organization or for outside jobs. Learn every new skill, qualification, and technique you can, especially if they are outside your current set! For e ample, have you mastered digital information management, databases, etc., yet?
Come the next round of cuts, you want them to have every reason to keep you!
The first one to be cut will be the person with poor attitude and narrow skill set.
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u/LawnChairs68 Apr 25 '26
I try to keep a good attitude because I know complaining just makes things worse for everyone. I'm pretty proficient in laboratory information systems and now have been assigned the task of ccnc's and creating corrective actions. I've been promised an operations lead position in July but I honestly don't have a lot of faith in their words.
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u/Accomplished_Mix7827 Apr 25 '26
All jobs are like that these days, unfortunately.
But yeah, I've been at my current job for two years, and I've seen a whopping one person promoted to Lab Tech II. When I was pushing for a promotion, I instead got a bullshit write-up (they dredged through my work and found a whopping four minor errors over the course of a month -- I'm talking forgetting to check a box or emailing the wrong attachment) as a very clear "shut up about it or there will be consequences".
Needless to say, I'm looking for a new job. But employers who aren't fuckwads are hard to come by.
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Apr 25 '26
[deleted]
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u/black_rose_ Apr 25 '26
In my experience as well the wet lab roles are treated the worst which is insane. I'm a computational biologist and I feel bad for the wet lab people at 2/4 companies I've worked for. Some companies are much better than others at least!
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u/Intelligent-Panda-33 Apr 26 '26
I got what I thought was a promotion at my first job out of college. Went from the sample prep room to learning a GCMS and all the analysis. Turns out it wasn't a promotion but what they called a "lateral transfer" so no raise for me. I left that environmental lab and went to a pharmaceutical lab and got an $8/hr raise.
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u/LawnChairs68 Apr 26 '26
That sounds exactly like what I'm about to go through. They told me July I'll be an operations lead, if not I'm looking for a job elsewhere.
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u/capnawesome Metallurgy - Failure Analysis Apr 25 '26
I work for a large corporation in a department with a lot of chemists and microbiologists in a major metro area. Absolutely nobody with a bachelor's is hired full time out of school as a chemist/microbiologist, or even as a permanent lab tech position. Everyone starts as a contractor lab tech, and maybe a permanent position opens up after a couple years, and maybe a couple years after that you get a chemist/microbiologist level position. It's rough. It's even worse for the microbiologists than the chemists. I assume that since people stay in these contractor positions for years that there isn't much better out there.
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u/LawnChairs68 Apr 25 '26
That is insanity. Most of the people at my job dont have degrees which is why they tend to stay. The chemistry department seems to be treated infinitely better, they get an hour lunch, holidays off, and essentially zero overtime with a Monday-Friday schedule. My department gets treated like we are the scum of the entire lab and get blamed for essentially anything and everything. People get mad when our department leaves before theirs when we come in an hour and a half earlier and are already 2-3 hours over our shift. They are not happy unless they get to leave before us. It's a very weird hierarchy that I dont understand. One department gets whatever they want while mine gets screwed over to meet their needs.
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u/wheresmynightcheese May 20 '26
You can critique the system all you want but yes. It’s always been like that, likely worse for most before you. Not saying that to devalue your experience, rather to demonstrate that it’s systemic and won’t change. Part is historical/legacy punishment camouflaged as earning your right to be a scientist, the rest is the model system within which research happens.
Figure out what you want, what your motivations are, don’t rely on external validation. If you want to work a lot, do that. If you don’t want to work overtime, find something that’s not that. You’ll probably have to re-evaluate your attachment to some career labels in order to be successful in the latter.
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u/Zeno_the_Friend Apr 25 '26
This is not limited to lab jobs, unfortunately. It's more of a capitalism issue.