I had a deep introspection about my career transition recently, and this tweet matches my experience pretty well. I also would like to share some thoughts on this topic as a former Materials Sci PhD who transitioned from clean tech to data science / machine learning.
My PI at Stanford was working on the physics and materials of advanced solar cells. By that virtue, almost all of us are driven by the virtue of clean energy and climate change impact, and spent 5+ years learning about the in-and-outs of solar cells.
When I entered the job market after my PhD in 2011, I joined a solar cell startup, wanting to put my passion on climate change and my domain expertise on solar cells to good use. But after clean tech 1.0 wave died in 2011-12, clean tech jobs were few and far in between in the SV. (trivia: Solyndra collapsed within a month or two after I started my new job).
And you can’t help but feeling being out-competed by software engineers on housing, daycare, etc. You hear about so many stories from your colleagues of being outbid on housing, or had to endure 1.5+ hr (one-way) commute to save on housing cost, and you get discouraged.
Plus, as a sector, clean tech manufacturing like PV and LEDs are just tough businesses to be in. Your product is a commodity, facing increasing competition from Asia. During my second job (my employer at the time was top-3 LED manufacturer by revenue in the world), LED chip sales price falls 20%-40% YoY; solar cell prices ($/W) during this time probably drops at similar rate. It is great news for downstream installers and customers, but it puts a huge pressure on our employers’ profitability, and accordingly, employee’s compensation.
Early career professionals like myself began to realize that we had a choice to make - either stay in the same industry and be relocated elsewhere, willingly or unwillingly (increasingly, the job openings are in Asia); or try to switch job families and/or industries, in order to stay in HCOL area like SF bay area. So that’s what I, along with many of my peers, did.
Many of my former colleagues went on to work for consumer electronics companies (Apple, Amazon, etc). Others switch job families and became data scientists, program managers, and software engineers in order to stake a livelihood in the HCOL areas and not get priced out.
I am sure many of us would have loved to stay in the climate / clean tech area if the employment opportunities and commensurate compensations were available at the time. But speaking from experience, such opportunities hasn’t been widely available throughout 2012-2018.
I am happy to see investors having renewed their interests in this area, and new classes of clean tech 2.0 startups emerging. And I sincerely hope that this time, it will be different. In a way, the future of this planet depends on it.
(Originally posted on twitter)
Tweet of ikding/1211143148304568320
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