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Physicists taking jobs as Silicon Valley software engineers

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Re: Physicists taking jobs as Silicon Valley software engineers

#131

Post by biggerfisch »

I was a CS student who (personally, not a critique of all CS teaching) got tired of the way CS was taught at my school, which focused so much more on algorithms (which is good) and how to implement them (which can also be good) but tested the knowledge in ways I thought were only semi-useful. Fractions of a second of performance were more important to your grade than full correctness and good style. Collaboration was highly discouraged, which to some degree makes sense, but led to students who were inevitably terrible at group projects in senior year.

This eventually drove me to take a year off and then resume as a Physics major. I'm almost done now with my BS and am so happy I made this choice.

Despite switching to a Physics major, I'll probably end up working in a programming position eventually. It's a far easier career to get into.

Re: Physicists taking jobs as Silicon Valley software engineers

#132

Post by BeetleB »

thesz wrote: post #9

Physicists are one hell of science and engineering badasses. I know many physicists who became hardware engineers and even software engineers when they needed it. I know no software/hardware engineer who became physicist.

Were he alive, John Bardeen would want to have a word with you.

Re: Physicists taking jobs as Silicon Valley software engineers

#133

Post by dguest »

NumberSix wrote: post #43

This migration of physicists to the Silicon Valley and computer industry is not new. It has been true at least since the first big physics employment bubble crashed in the late 1960's, early 1970's. The post-Sputnik boom in physics degrees and grad students produced a huge surplus of physicists by the late 1960's. Dennis Ritchie started at Bell Labs in 1967. Back in the 60's, 70's, early 80's a fair number of physici…

This is a good summary, but we used both machine learning and maximum likelihood to discover the Higgs Boson. The difference is that we frequently use machine learning to identify the (already discovered) particles that the Higgs decays to.

Re: Physicists taking jobs as Silicon Valley software engineers

#134

Post by evanb »

randomsearch wrote: post #127
throw_away_777 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On average, a tenured physics professor will graduate a bit more than 10 PhD students over the course of their career. Physics as a field is not growing, so at most 10% of PhD students become professors. If you don't become a tenured professor there are very few jobs that aren't postdocs, and even if you wanted to you can't keep doing postdocs forever.

> even if you wanted to you can't keep doing postdocs forever. Why? I know an academic who has done exactly that. Nearing retirement now.

Many institutions have a hard rule that says you can't start a postdoc if you're more than 5 years out of your PhD program (discounting any time for parental leave, medical leaves of absence, etc.).

Re: Physicists taking jobs as Silicon Valley software engineers

#135

Post by montecarl »

deepnotderp wrote: post #47

Nitpick: newton's method is intractable in Deep learning since it's computationally intractable to compute the hessian matrix

Newton's method might be, but quasi-Newton methods like L-BFGS[1] are usable if you can calculate the gradient of your problem and have enough memory to store several previous coordinates and gradients (so maybe 10x the memory requirement of gradient descent).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited-memory_BFGS

Re: Physicists taking jobs as Silicon Valley software engineers

#136

Post by toomanybeersies »

NumberSix wrote: post #96
sciurus wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your strong objection to the phrase "potentially permanent position". Do you believe that the AIP is trying to mislead students into believing programming jobs in the private sector have tenure!? To me "potentially permanent" seems like a serviceable phrase to encompass positions in academia and in industry that do not have an end data built in to them. It contrasts them to "temporary" positions li…

The phrase "potentially permanent position" is misleading. Is it intentional? I don't know. The primary audience for a report on outcomes for Ph.D.'s in Physics one year after graduation, getting their Ph.D. degree, is students (and parents of students) evaluating whether to pursue a Ph.D.. Obviously, they should investigate longer term outcomes, but young people often don't, focusing the next step in their life/care…

I don't think "potentially permanent position" is misleading. I can remove a permanent marker with rubbing alcohol, yet I don't say that "permanent marker" is misleading.

My job is described as permanent full time, because my contract is ongoing, and I work 40 hours a week; when I was a student, I had a permanent part time job.

This is in contrast to a casual job, which in New Zealand is similar to at-will (but with strong restrictions on what roles can be casual); or a fixed term contract.

Re: Physicists taking jobs as Silicon Valley software engineers

#137

Post by thesz »

BeetleB wrote: post #132
thesz wrote: post #9

Physicists are one hell of science and engineering badasses. I know many physicists who became hardware engineers and even software engineers when they needed it. I know no software/hardware engineer who became physicist.

Were he alive, John Bardeen would want to have a word with you.

He was not a career hardware engineer turning to be physicist. He was physicist from the beginning.

Re: Physicists taking jobs as Silicon Valley software engineers

#138

Post by thesz »

musgravepeter wrote: post #48
thesz wrote: post #9

Physicists are one hell of science and engineering badasses. I know many physicists who became hardware engineers and even software engineers when they needed it. I know no software/hardware engineer who became physicist.

Depending on what "being a physicist" means, I did. Went from EE undergrad to physics PhD. Then worked in s/w but still tinker on physics projects on the side. GRTensorIII ( https://gitlab.com/grtensor/grtensor/wikis/home ) An iOS/Android app for Three Body simulations (Three Body) and a Unity gravity simulator (Gravity Engine). I would have loved to make a living wage in physics but the post-doc path is badly paid.

You have not spent couple of tens of years building EE career and then turn to physics. I am speaking of fully developed specialists in the field - well into their thirties and even forties.

Re: Physicists taking jobs as Silicon Valley software engineers

#139

Post by mng2 »

StClaire wrote: post #64
tmoot wrote: post #11

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…

You don't have to stay. Look for development jobs or internships for the Fall semester. If you like it more than what you're doing now, don't go back. If you decide that you want to get into the physics, the go back. Plenty of grad students take a semester or two off and go finish their PhDs. If your advisor blows a gasket, well, you can probably do better somewhere else anyway. I know a lot of graduate students and…

I agree, I realized the truth of your second-to-last sentence sometime during grad school. These people have played the academia game and it worked out for them, and their sense of self-worth and prestige is tied to their standing inside the system. Of course, the academia game is a lot more difficult to play these days.

Re: Physicists taking jobs as Silicon Valley software engineers

#140

Post by walrus1066 »

randlet wrote: post #20

This is a pretty common career path I think once people realize that finding a well paying physics gig is much much tougher than just becoming a developer. Every physicist has at least some programming experience and are generally adept at problem solving. Coding was always way more fun than doing 4th year/grad school level physics for me too. Also, it is especially tough to get a job if you're a mediocre physicist (…

Definitely agree with the coding being more fun. I found refactoring my teams messy analysis code much more satisfying than the laborious data analysis + paper writing.

For me it was also that nothing truly new was being discovered in my area of physics, so it all felt a bit boring.

Plus the politics that comes when post docs have to fight and plot over rare tenured positions when they appear.

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