Job search 2025 post-mortem and advice
The comp bio job market is scarier than usual: 2023 was a biotech bankruptcy bloodbath, 2024 was a little better, and as far as layoffs, 2025 has been worse. Academic and government sectors are also reeling from government cuts, and in the two places I have recently lived (Massachusetts and Maryland), cuts have specifically targeted large biomedical research employers (Harvard and NIH). The tech job market is pandemically weird and also not so hot. Anecdotally, there are lots of interesting job postings in comp bio, but each one might get hundreds of applicants per week, among which are many brilliant people. Some of them have training and qualifications very similar to me. I applied to about 65-70 jobs and got almost no interviews (except where I had a referral).