Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

Disclaimer: Most my professional background is in HEP/Astro, outside that find I might be a bit off.

Basically labs/institutes and large universities that get government funding looking for software developers.

National Labs (though it's getting rougher), flagship universities with large labs or targeted programs like MIT (Lincoln Lab), Johns Hopkins (JHAPL, STSCI), UIUC or UChicago (NCSA, UChicago pioneered much of grid computing but some of that was Argonne if I remember too), USC, and especially smaller labs/institutes or even specific projects at large universities. You can also look outside the US, France (INRIA, IN2P3) and Germany (Max Planck institutes) can be good places, Italy is okay, the Netherlands is good but not as large, UK is good, Australia is okay. In Europe you can't expect to do anything with CERN unless you are working at a National Lab in the US generally. Japan does tons of stuff but most people I know who have worked on Japanese projects in Japan don't enjoy it as much.

Secondary jobs are also a possibility near big national labs (Bay Area, New Mexico, Illinois), but usually that's less software and more big-E engineering.

Materials science and bio have a different layout but much of the cutting edge of that tends to be located near light sources these sorts of facilities too, and the need for software devs is growing there.

I wanted to provide a different answer from many of those "glad I left" answers here. I sympathize with those "keep the physics brain alive" goals of other commenters.

Physics undergrad (2015) with thesis in nonlinear dynamics, but have done research in astro. Always wanted to do GR-related research.

Landed an awesome job in quantitative finance where I write computational code (distributed computation) for various purposes (researching markets, analyzing risk, etc.). Job is interesting - but not "capital I" Interesting in the same way that physics was. I guess that is part of the trade-off.

I'm considering going back to academia - especially in light of the G-wave phenomena finally having sizeable datasets to analyse in recent years - its getting increasingly difficult to keep my studies of physics/math at "hobby" level.

Interested to hear if anyone else out there has "gone back".

I got a PhD in 2013 (theoretical/computational astrophysics), did a postdoc for two years, and was a professor for one year. I’m now a data scientist at a large tech company in the Bay Area working on a machine learning platform.

I enjoyed grad school for the most part, and was really into teaching. By the time I got a professor job (a visiting one, not tenure-track), I was getting anxious about the long-term job prospects and it was getting harder and harder to justify the workload (teaching, grants, advising students, etc) given the relatively poor job security and pay. I felt if I was going to switch careers, I should do it soon since it’s not going to get any easier.

By this point (~3 yrs ago) I had several physics/astro friends who had become data scientists or similar jobs in the tech industry. Some had done programs like Insight and some got jobs on their own. Everyone I talked to seemed happy with their decision to switch careers. I ended up doing Insight and getting a job quickly after and am glad I did. The variety of the work, amount of collaboration (more), and new things to learn is still keeping me interested. I was also surprised at how many opportunities there are to give talks and seminars in the industry, which helps scratch the teaching itch.

There's really not enough long term jobs in academia so people have to look elsewhere. Fortunately physics really sets you up for a lot of very different jobs. I myself am one of the lucky ones, am working on a permanent position (similar to associate Prof) at a Uni in Sweden. I was thinking of jumping of academia and doing something else several times but somehow also a good opportunity just at the right moment. One thing that is often easy to forget is that there is so much more than the current hot topics that make the big media splashes (quantum computing, gravitational waves, graphene atm). I work in optics/photonics primarily in optical telecom. My work is much more engineering-like than many of the above topics. Anyway the further along in your career you come the more managerial work you do, same in academia as everywhere else I think.

I was actually at Pitt when Rovelli and Newman were still team teaching GR and always regretted not taking this course. Would Modern Classical Physics be enough in the GR section to get the basics down? It looks decent for the stuff I know about (optics and so on).