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Physicists have been taking jobs as software engineers since the 90s. Career-wise, physics is the comparative literature of the exact sciences.
I'm a physics phd student, but I did my undergrad in cs+physics at well known school in the midwest. I really regret going to grad school for physics, I gave up a lot of earning potential, time to develop new skills and I've forgotten a lot of my CS background. Most methods in my area have already been developed and the pressure to publish (pushy advisor, several projects not producing the intended results, and propo…
Physicists have been taking jobs as software engineers since the 90s. Career-wise, physics is the comparative literature of the exact sciences.
I know a self-taught developer who was specifically getting a degree in physics because of the wide variety of fields that it could allow him to work in. If you insist on getting a degree, degrees in engineering fundamentals like math or physics are probably the best things to target.
Physicists have been taking jobs as software engineers since the 90s. Career-wise, physics is the comparative literature of the exact sciences.
Since the '40s, as the article notes. Early on, science/engineering/math problems were one of the driving forces of computing, typically with a distinct separation from commercial/administrative side — for instance, scientific machines had floating point while commercial machines had decimal arithmetic. It wasn't until the First Dotcom Bubble that the commercial culture decisively ‘won’.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
/me raises hand Degree in physics, working software for 20 years and still feel like an impostor ... not that I remember any physics at this stage
Impostor syndrome seems bogus but only because I've never experienced it and therefore can't understand it. Why do you feel like an impostor? The world is analog, not digital. There's no rite of passage that will suddenly switch you from being an "impostor" to being "legitimate". I've met EE majors who turned out to be better software developers than CS majors and vice versa.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5116369/
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327752jpa5602_...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2007....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
/me raises hand Degree in physics, working software for 20 years and still feel like an impostor ... not that I remember any physics at this stage
Impostor syndrome seems bogus but only because I've never experienced it and therefore can't understand it. Why do you feel like an impostor? The world is analog, not digital. There's no rite of passage that will suddenly switch you from being an "impostor" to being "legitimate". I've met EE majors who turned out to be better software developers than CS majors and vice versa.
On to your question: It's hard to pin down the exact root cause, but it seems (in my case at least) to stem from being an outsider -- a y in a sea of x's. When everyone else doing your job has a specific attribute that you don't, you can start to wonder whether you really belong in that role. The literal feeling is, "One of these days, I'll say the wrong acronym in stand-up, the rest of the team is going to figure out that I'm just winging this Agile Scrum thing, and that will be that."
That can mean being the only physicist in a company of CS grads, or the only woman on an all-male engineering team.
Being in a job where you're always learning, received no formal training, and where the expectations are fluid can amplify the feeling, since there's no yardstick against which to compare your performance. If you're a fast learner, it can be hard to believe you've gotten as good at something as people who had years of training/have been doing it for years.
AIP does many nice studies of where physics PhD's end up.
One of the hardest challenge as a Physics PhD in industry is finding interesting problems. See fig 2.2 for reporting on that: https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/statistics/phd-plus-...