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Physicists taking jobs as Silicon Valley software engineers

200 points by electic 10y ago

zitterbewegung 10y ago
Wow, too much data science/ machine learning hype into one article. If you are a Physicist that can make machine learning models doesn't that make you a coder also? Furthermore, they give two examples who weren't Computer Science students but I'm sure I can find a counterexample to this.
tresil 10y ago
Shameless clickbait. TL;DR: Some physicists have become software developers because it pays better than being a physicist. Physicists are smart people overall so they are well suited to solving complex problems that one encounters when developing software.
- deleted 10y ago
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princeb 10y ago
move over javascript, matlab will soon rule silicon valley! edit: this is just a tongue in cheek comment that physicists will rule silicon valley with about the same chance of success matlab will be used for enterprise dev.
- soVeryTired 10y ago
  Move over matlab, numpy will soon rule data science!
  - lotsoflumens 10y ago
    Javascript will use Numpy and then both will rule data science.
- hprotagonist 10y ago
  you must be thinking mechanical engineers. Real Physicists use fortran.
  - asafira 10y ago
    Pencil and paper is where it's at.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
throwaway21211 10y ago
Confirmed by Netcraft.
KKKKkkkk1 10y ago
Physicists have been taking jobs as software engineers since the 90s. Career-wise, physics is the comparative literature of the exact sciences.
- circlefavshape 10y ago
  /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
  - ythn 10y ago
    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.
    - snerbles 10y ago
      While you may not experience it, impostor syndrome is a documented phenomenon: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5116369/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5116369/ http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327752jpa5602_10 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327752jpa5602_... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2007.00318.x/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2007.... http://ejournals.swu.ac.th/index.php/jbse/article/view/1712 http://ejournals.swu.ac.th/index.php/jbse/article/view/1712
    - URSpider94 10y ago
      First, a tip -- if you genuinely want to learn more about something, don't start by saying it "seems bogus". Not the best way to open up a discussion. 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.
thesz 10y ago
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.
- adrianN 10y ago
  I'd become a physicist if there were jobs for physicists doing actual physics.
  - thesz 10y ago
    Me (and you) can do theoretical work. Even nanomanipulators are DIY: http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2011-07/you-built-what-scanning-electron-microscope http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2011-07/you-built-what-sca... or http://hackaday.com/2015/01/13/cheap-diy-microscope-sees-individual-atoms/ http://hackaday.com/2015/01/13/cheap-diy-microscope-sees-ind... (ESM can be used to manipulate atoms) Yet I haven't had time or courage. Or badassness.
    - PeterisP 10y ago
      To work on theoretical physics, you anyway do need a job in physics or win the lottery - doing it as a hobby for 15 hours a week after a job doesn't count, to get anywhere you do need to be able to work on it full time for a few years.
      - thesz 10y ago
        And this is what I call lack of courage.
- mac01021 10y ago
  For some, that's because they're not badass enough. For many, it's because they never needed it.
- musgravepeter 10y ago
  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 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.
tmoot 10y ago
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 proposal writing) has always been hampering away at my free time to think. I really dislike this system. At the same time, I'm sure exists in industry too (never had a real job). I'm not going lie, I feel a bit trapped, but I'm still a fairly positive person. In the sciences, grad school is sold as a necessity but I'm starting to think this is a way of fueling the ivory tower. I realize that this is a bit incoherent/ranty, but whatever. :)
- ddavis 10y ago
  Also a physics PhD student. I never touched CS as un undergrad, but I got very interested in writing software as an undergrad when I started in an experimental HEP group (I've never taken any formal programming courses). I don't completely regret going to grad school even though I often think about the likelihood that I leave physics when I graduate to get a job in software development. I also dislike the academic system - and that's the biggest contributor to that likelihood to leave for the software industry being high. The physics itself is no longer _incredibly_ interesting to me, but I can't shake the data analysis itch ;)
- physcab 10y ago
  I was a Physics undergrad+ Physics / Materials Science PhD and I ended up just quitting 4 years into my PhD. You can do it too. You don't owe your advisor anything and you've definitely put in your indentured servitude. I ended up getting a job as a data analyst / scientist and never looked back. You can work on interesting problems, use the same experimental design knowledge and methods, and get paid $100k more than a grad student.
  - koolba 10y ago
    Four years? Is it common for a Physics PhD to take that long? I thought most fields are closer to two years.
Jordrok 10y ago
Can confirm, have a physics PHD friend who is now doing primarily programming work. I, for one, welcome our new physicist overlords!
- popobobo 10y ago
  overlord is a strong word. As a physics major, I would prefer to be called a tech minion.
randlet 10y ago
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 (like me) whereas there are very many jobs available for fair to middling programmers (like me). Don't want to guess at numbers but my gut instinct & experience tells me that very few physicists end up doing physics and most end up in finance, software, and hardware.
- jschwartzi 10y ago
  The American Physical Society maintains numbers on career paths for their student members, and less than 5 percent end up with a Physicist job title. Most end up in the career paths you list.
  - crazypyro 10y ago
    For anyone curious, here's a one year phd employment survey for physics: https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/statistics/employment/phdinitemp-p-14.pdf https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/statistics/employmen... 803 responses, 297 in potentially full-time positions. 62% (of all physics phds employed at potentially full-time positions) in non-physics field, break down by industry: Engineering - 20% Computer software - 14% Business or Finance - 11% Other sciences - 8% Education - 2% Medical services - 2% Other - 5%
    - NumberSix 10y ago
      The use of the phrase "potentially permanent positions" in the AIP report for industry positions, especially in the computer industry, is highly misleading. Academia, including some government labs and institutes, has tenured positions and other positions with guarantees of job security until retirement. The vast majority of industry employees are "at will" and can be laid off at any time for any reason or no reason. Senior executives often have employment contracts that take them out of the "at will" category but these rarely provide long term "permanent" status. Indeed, they can usually be fired by the Board of Directors. The computer industry is notoriously unstable with jobs often quite short term in practice, with layoffs common. Just to be clear, the referenced AIP report starts with the phrase: Positions accepted by PhD degree recipients following receipt of their degrees fall into three categories: postdoctoral fellowships, potentially permanent positions and other temporary positions. The figure on page two of the AIP report specifically lists a "private sector" block under "potentially permanent". Tabel 1 on page 3 lists 70 percent of potentially permanent positions as "private sector." Again this is very misleading as private sector positions are potentially permanent only is the sense that there is a small chance that you might continue at the same employer until retirement; there is nothing like a guarantee.
drallison 10y ago
Not a new phenomenon. Most super-programmers and computer scientists (especially greybeards) were trained a physicists.
redsymbol 10y ago
Anecdata: As a software engineer who studied physics before C.S., it feels like I've had a massively unfair advantage my entire career. Served me very well.
- wwweston 10y ago
  Can you describe the advantage? (Was within a hair of a physics minor before I studied C.S., but might have wiped out the advantage by switching to Mathematics?)
  - sampo 10y ago
    Most of the CS students don't like math, so CS teaching has developed a tradition of only the minimal need-to-know math exposure. But then you have to always operate at the very edge of your math competence, because that is all you were taught. If you have a solid math foundation, then most of the math concepts you face in CS are well within your comfort zone.
jfe 10y ago
iirc dennis ritchie was an applied mathematician.
rubidium 10y ago
No real "news" here. 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-10/PhysPrivSect.pdf https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/statistics/phd-plus-...
ejrowley 10y ago
I studied physics, with intention of becoming a developer (which I did). I didn't have much appetite for a CS course and felt the physics would give me a broader set of skills.
- FlorianRappl 10y ago
  I followed a similar path and can only agree on the attitude. Most of the relevant CS knowledge is just that: knowledge. Studying physics is usually less about knowledge and more about general problem solving skills.
  - niels_olson 10y ago
    I'd go beyond "general problem-solving skills". Physics gives you high quality math training (albeit somewhat truncated with respect to number theory), coupled with demanding experimental methods, and a deep, principled understanding of the foundations of the universe. Nothing is beyond your reach. Any other quantitative or logical discipline is just laying there, waiting for you.
roymurdock 10y ago
Anderson left Harvard before getting his PhD because he came to view the field much as Boykin does—as an intellectual pursuit of diminishing returns. But that’s not the case on the internet. “Implicit in ‘the internet’ is the scope, the coverage of it,” Anderson says. “It makes opportunities are much greater, but it also enriches the challenge space, the problem space. There is intellectual upside.” Was thinking of pursuing masters/PhD in economics but have heard/read a lot along the same lines of an intellectual pursuit with diminishing returns both in terms of salary and real world impact. The most useful thing I've done on Twitter is follow a bunch of economists and professors who are constantly debating current econ thinking/papers. There are a few I really respect, but for the most part both the academic environment for PhD level economists seems kind of toxic to me as an outsider. Been thinking a lot recently about how my generation (I'm 24) is going to have to be a lot more practical due to economic realities...
- cinjon 10y ago
  Who are the Econ people you're talking about on twitter?
  - roymurdock 10y ago
    NR Kocherlakota (my favorite): https://twitter.com/kocherlakota009 https://twitter.com/kocherlakota009 Tim Duy: https://twitter.com/TimDuy https://twitter.com/TimDuy Claudia Sahm: https://twitter.com/Claudia_Sahm https://twitter.com/Claudia_Sahm Stephen Williamson: https://twitter.com/1954swilliamson https://twitter.com/1954swilliamson David Andolfatto: https://twitter.com/dandolfa https://twitter.com/dandolfa Tony Yates: https://twitter.com/t0nyyates https://twitter.com/t0nyyates Neel Kashkari: https://twitter.com/neelkashkari https://twitter.com/neelkashkari Noah Smith: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion https://twitter.com/Noahpinion Tyler Cowen: https://twitter.com/tylercowen https://twitter.com/tylercowen Justin Wolfers: https://twitter.com/JustinWolfers https://twitter.com/JustinWolfers Paul Romer: https://twitter.com/paulmromer https://twitter.com/paulmromer Jan Zilinsky: https://twitter.com/janzilinsky https://twitter.com/janzilinsky
    - 10y ago
Philomath 10y ago
Aerospace engineer here! Not a physicist and not that there's a lack of open jobs, but I was also way more interested in programming. I started my own project in 2nd year of university and it changed everything to me. I've been able to apply my knowledge during my years of university and also out of it with my side-projects.
zxcvvcxz 10y ago
Does anyone else think that general programming education (not necessarily computer science) is overrated? I much rather hire people that I know can think in both in terms of fundamental logical principles, and who understand the scientific method, which comes up more than one expects in business. For example, I've seen physicists run much better marketing analytics than "growth hackers". And who cares if someone can cross-off a list of generic programming language/frameworks? If you need that specific of a cog in your machine, the position probably isn't that innovative and you're better off outsourcing. Or hire someone smart and eager, pay them decently, and they'll learn what they need, if they're so inclined.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  I would agree. I'd much rather deal with people who are good at math or know something about a particular industry. If you are a little disciplined and accept that there are some rules to follow learning software development is not that hard.
- asafira 10y ago
  How would you recommend searching for those sorts of roles that aren't just cog-in-a-machine but require a good bit of technical ability and creativity on the job? No offense, but if you look at most job listings (even on hacker news), they often specifically mention technologies and languages one should already have a background in, and it's definitely not clear they would take someone that has succeeded in differing technical challenges.
  - zxcvvcxz 10y ago
    A lot of employers will list too much stuff just because it's an ingrained habit. In my experience, both as an employee and employer who used to do this to some extent, these requirement lists are fairly 'negotiable'. If you have the top 2-3 things they'd need (e.g. CS algorithms knowledge + some scripting language + some database experience), and are otherwise a good applicant, go ahead and apply with the mindset being that you'd have no problem picking up other frameworks X,Y,Z. Of course, spend an evening to take a look at them and be confident enough to make that the case.
m23khan 10y ago
I myself have only a CS background (BSc + MSc in CS), and I am working in IT for last 8 years. Initially, I used to have negative opinion towards people from other non-CS backgrounds able to get jobs as Software Engineers and as IT Managers/Directors. Now for the past 5 years, I am highly appreciative of such people because each of them bring knowledge and interesting viewpoints from their respective academic/training backgrounds which serves to enrich the IT world. Thank you guys :-)
NumberSix 10y ago
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 physicists decamped for Bell Labs, mostly to work on computer and telecommunications related activities. A high profile example is Emanuel Derman, author of My Life as a Quant (2004) and later books, who worked at Bell Labs from 1980 to 1985 before moving on to Wall Street. He mentions quite a number of other physicists at Bell Labs at the same time. Most physicists end up in some sort of software development. The high profile "quant" jobs are actually rather rare and hard to get. The Wall Street firms are typically going after very strong physicists, especially theoretical physicists like Derman. Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft and Intellectual Ventures fame (or infamy) has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Princeton. Did not go to Wall Street. :-) The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produced a huge surplus of experimental particle physics (high energy physics) Ph.D.'s with no jobs in the field. Experimental particle physics involves large amounts of software development for data acquisition, instrument monitoring and control, and data analysis, mostly in C and C++, although there is still some "legacy" FORTRAN software. The heyday of FORTRAN in physics was a long time ago. Although there have been attempts to use neural networks and other machine learning methods in particle physics, the workhorse of data analysis in the field is Ronald Fisher's maximum likelihood estimation and classification -- primarily estimation of parameters such as the mass and width of the Higgs Boson. The discovery of the Higgs was a maximum likelihood analysis. Although it is undoubtedly possible to map maximum likelihood onto neural networks, in practice they are different. Neural networks are an attempt to simulate the low level structure of the neurons in the brain and solve problems by brute force fitting of data to models with huge numbers of adjustable parameters. In contrast, maximum likelihood involves attempts to understand the phenomenon under study and model it as a small number of functions corresponding to higher level concepts such as the Higgs Boson. A neural net could exactly fit the Higgs Boson peak yet never produce or confirm a physical model of what causes the peak.
- batbomb 10y ago
  Part of that is because there was only physics and math degrees up to around the 60s. There wasn't really EE or CS, and even when there was, most the professors were originally trained as physicists.
deepnotderp 10y ago
Nitpick: newton's method is intractable in Deep learning since it's computationally intractable to compute the hessian matrix
- montecarl 10y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited-memory_BFGS
  - throwaway61AR 10y ago
    Yep this was used by Jeff Dean et al. in one of Google Brain's earlier experiments https://research.google.com/archive/large_deep_networks_nips2012.html https://research.google.com/archive/large_deep_networks_nips...
tehwalrus 10y ago
Did physics undergrad, worked as a developer for a couple of years, then did a computational physics PhD, now firmly back as a developer. I would do open ended research if there were any jobs going, but there generally aren't. And I'd be just as happy in computer science as physics.
cowmix 10y ago
Same as it ever was. All my best developers over the past 25 years I've managed were either physicists or mathematicians.
CalRobert 10y ago
This starts pretty early. I mean, would you rather be treated like dirt doing your prof's work for her or him for poverty-level wages (if any!) or making a decent income as a CS intern? I got my undergrad in physics, but spent all of my free time (and a lot of what probably should have been study-time) teaching myself to code. It had a pretty brutal impact on my GPA, but I've no regrets.
dkarapetyan 10y ago
Mathematicians as well. It's not just physicists. In fact any of the STEM fields is a valid path to software engineering.
elliott34 10y ago
Doesn't really seem like the author spoke to a lot of actual physicists to write this article. Don't get me wrong, physics majors attract a certain type of intellect, but the vast majority of curriculum (quantum, EM, mechanics) are things THAT HAVE BARELY CHANGED IN THE PAST 50 YEARS. Meanwhile, CS majors come out much more prepared and hirable on the job market. As far as the machine learning market goes, 90% of the projects require software engineering skills, the last 10% requires being able to go underneath the covers of linear algebra libraries, etc. I just think the whole physics>cs degree for machine learning argument is not totally persuasive given my experience.
- woah 10y ago
  They have to turn it into some kind of story with more excitement and conflict than "some people who are good at math are getting jobs as engineers".
- vitaminbandit 10y ago
  How is the notion that "the vast majority of curriculum (quantum, EM, mechanics) are things THAT HAVE BARELY CHANGED IN THE PAST 50 YEARS" relevant to this discussion?
  - elliott34 10y ago
    Because the author draws a lot of parallels between computer science majors and physics majors, citing that physics majors are better prepared for the type of work ML requires. I am a physics major turned data scientist, and my argument is that I would have better prepared having been a CS major, given what the majority of my work requires. While in a CS major, a lot of data structures and algorithms haven't changed in 50 years either, you're much more likely to take electives with marketable skills or with up-to-date technologies (distributed systems, operating systems, OO/fp, databases, concurrency) that would've helped me in my day to day more than a math course or too did during my physics degree.
asafira 10y ago
Whoa! I am actually currently in a physics PhD program, in my last 1-2 years, and have been pursuing internship opportunities for the summer. For me, I've actually wanted to get my PhD in physics and then work in tech for as long as I can remember (so it's not primarily that I feel like the academic job market is too competitive for me, or doesn't pay enough, but those are pretty good reasons, too...) . I actually have often found it awkward to fit into the usual computer science bins that companies organize projects into. In addition to a hefty amount of data analysis and software engineering, my PhD has required knowledge from a wide variety of different types of engineering, including optics, microwave engineering, and semiconductor fabrication. Combining everything into a 1-page resume, I've found it's not super obvious where my placement would be within most companies. I am currently in the team-matching phase for a google internship, for example, but haven't heard anything. For those that are getting themselves in the door, do you have any tips?
- santaclaus 10y ago
  > For those that are getting themselves in the door, do you have any tips? I have no tips, but a guide to dealing with recruiters (who are typically pattern matching for the framework du jour) for developers from a (hard) science background would be really cool!
- emcq 10y ago
  Craft your resume around the job you want. Add in the other details to fit. If you dont know what you want, do more internships, soul searching, or perhaps even explore career coaches. The best thing getting my food in the door in silicon valley was to move there; quite a few opportunities for qualified candidates afterwards. Even research labs at Stanford or Cal still value hiring the broad experiences you describe and could be a foot in the door.
- alexyim 10y ago
  Have you thought about de-emphasizing the less relevant experiences? Find the companies you're interested in, tailor your resumé to be mostly what is applicable, and then hint at your expanded experience. As an example, a one-liner on "optics, microwave engineering, and semiconductor fabrication" says a lot already.
renlo 10y ago
I'm working on a Masters in CS right now and have been interested in heading into some form of 'Data Science', whatever that may entail. Does this mean that only physics/math/stats majors are getting into this field? At my current place of employment this is the case for the data scientists; all have an academic background in one of these three fields, all have a Masters or PhD. I assumed this was because the head data scientist had a long history with academia and thus had a predilection for academics. From my experience the data science concepts I have encountered thus-far seem pretty straightforward and I suspect that people are trying to make these concepts seem more difficult/arcane than they are by using notations/concepts only learned in academia. Am I wrong here? Is it actually a field which requires a PhD in Math to understand? My exposure has only been with toy examples (logistic regression, simple perceptrons, similarity algorithms, etc). How easy is it to get into the field without a heavy academic background?
grillvogel 10y ago
its really great that our world's top scientists are working on ad monetization
return0 10y ago
Strange how the article doesn't mention that (not Hinton), Hopfield, Sejnowski, Kohonen , Amari etc. etc. were all phycisists. Also, physicists working for software is not only a silicon-valley phenomenon .
- p1esk 10y ago
  Hinton was never a physicist.
eva1984 10y ago
> In other words, all the physicists pushing into the realm of the Silicon Valley engineer is a sign of a much bigger change to come. So this article comes all the way to this. Is there data that hiring of physicists speeded up in the recent years? And why roles they are taken? Presumably not all in machine learning, if I have to guess. Until then, this is another effort to turn an otherwise good interview into an unsubstantiated editorial aiming for nothing but hype.
- throw_away_777 10y ago
  Most physicists who recently graduated who I know (who don't do a postdoc) have transitioned or are looking to transition into data science. I am in the looking to transition group, so my sample may be biased though.
emcq 10y ago
There was a time before computer science degrees existed. Guess who were some the first folks to use computers and pioneer our field? Physicists and mathematicians! Von Neumann, Feynman, Metropolis, Vapnik, Babagge, Lovelace, Turing, Church, Hopper, Brooks...
loblollyboy 10y ago
I didn't study CS, I more use software (like django) than build it, and, in fact, probably misuse it. But the few plasma physics classes I took for my MS are an order of magnitude more complex than any programming I have ever done.
akhilcacharya 10y ago
I'm surprised that this is surprising. Physics as a career doesn't pay terribly well, but as a degree offers a very wide breadth in coursework and skills. Grad students in particular usually have experience in HPC, for instance.
amai 10y ago
Wired: "Move Over, Coders—Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley" And soon we will rule the world, muhahaha...!
- Koshkin 10y ago
  > Move Over, Coders "Coders" - sure, but not software engineers. Incidentally, the skill of "coding" (i.e. using a programming language to automate tasks on a computer) should, in my opinion, be taught in school at an early age along with the multiplication table.
amai 10y ago
While being a student a physics professor told me: "Study physics now. Because later when you have a job, you might get paid to learn using some software tool or a new programming language. But no company will ever send you into a quantum mechanics lecture. " He was right.
- throwaway61AR 10y ago
  No he wasn't. At the google X labs we had a quantum mechanics lecture from a guest speaker, literally only a couple of months back.
  - eanzenberg 10y ago
    1 lecture at arguably undergrad level vs. 30 lectures (2 semesters) of grad level qm
- analog31 10y ago
  Oddly enough, I received similar advice from my parents, 35 years ago when I started college. This was of course just at the dawn of the personal computer age. My mom was teaching programming at a nearby college, and she literally thought that programming was too easy to spend 4 years learning in the classroom. People were getting programming jobs after one year in her course. Also, nobody had any idea where the industry, or the economy, were headed. Both of my parents started their careers as scientists in industry after getting graduate degrees in the 50s. They saw people with science background being able to go into practically anything, including programming, business, entrepreneurship, and so forth. I learned programming in high school, and fell in love with it, but I had an internship at a computer facility, and also looked ahead at the typical CS curriculum. It all seemed terribly boring. So I majored in math and physics. Oddly enough, the people who were doing things with computers, that interested me, were in the physics department. I developed the ability to design computerized electronics for measurement and control systems -- which became my career. This was even before "embedded systems" was widely taught in EE departments. But realistically, a large portion of the software industry today does not require people with a science background. What I don't know is if I'd still find it boring. Perhaps my parents' attitude was along the line of "you can do anything with a liberal arts education," but with the stipulation that the liberal arts include math and science.
biggerfisch 10y ago
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.
Koshkin 10y ago
The effort one has to put into getting a physics degree seems to me comparable to that of becoming a physician (a medical doctor), and it pains me to see all that effort wasted. Some argue that it is the acquired skill in solving problems that matters, but, having seen physicists and mathematicians (and even "computer scientists") by training trying to solve software engineering problems, I have to disagree. Likewise, from what I have also observed, problem solving skills of a good software engineer may not be by themselves all that useful when trying to tackle problems in physics and mathematics.
- FrostyElsa 10y ago
  We need more physicists so we can prove the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics so I can travel to the world where I'm a billionaire.
lowbloodsugar 10y ago
Physics major here, but programming since age 11. I wasn't a fan of how CS was taught to my friends, but undeniably there is so much incredibly important knowledge in CS that you won't get in a Physics degree. Such important works as the Dragon compiler book, Introductions to Algorithms, SICP, the Purity Test. Since coursera came along, I've found a number of online courses absolutely mind-altering. Basically, to my fellow physicists: yes, you are a smarty pants, but respect the body of CS knowledge and learn it.
ExcessiveAccts 10y ago
I don't get it. I'm studying physics because I want to help shed light on the mysteries of reality. It might be hard to get a job in physics and achieve that, but it's a hell of a lot harder to get in a job in software development and achieve that. Despite this, all I'm reading is optimism about how well-paying and interesting software development is for physicists. So what? If those were my primary concerns, I wouldn't have studied physics in the first place! I get the hidden impression that the meaningfulness of science -- pursuing the truth, the nature of the universe -- is being swept under the rug because it's no longer paying the bills. That's a goddamn tragedy, not the cause for celebration this article is making it out to be.
- FiatLuxDave 10y ago
  Don't give up. It is possible to have a career in physics. It's not the easy path: academia has its many challenges, and software is in it's glory days. But the Universe is still there, and there is still so much to learn.
bondolo 10y ago
Considering how competitive physics graduate programs are at top schools it is a shame to hear that so few are pursuing careers in physics and some appear to be calculating in advance their move to CS. I love CS but if I had a passion for physics I would be pissed to see someone that society, schools, mentors, peers have invested in to do physics go be quant at an investment bank. It is not that working for a bank is intrinsically bad, more the case that individuals should consider the opportunity they may have been taking from others in pursuing a specialized education they subsequently don't use.
Diederich 10y ago
I sat right next to a really smart guy who was a hadoop administrator. Turns out he got a PhD in theoretical physics and did some graduate work at Fermilab. Holy crap...this run of the mill Hadoop administrator is some kind of physics genius. I asked him why....he said that his true love, particle physics, just didn't pay the bills like any random IT related job does. Which is a damn shame. PS: While we were talking, a dude one row over popped up and said he had a PhD in Chemistry or something.
mizzao 10y ago
Is there a huge difference between physics PhDs and computer science PhDs in this argument? Both are overspecialized in their research, but both also have a wide range of skills in programming, abstract problem solving, writing, communication, and so on. Both will likely have high-level knowledge of a variety of machine learning methods, except the CS PhD that actually published machine learning research who will know a bit more about some very specific topics. (I'm a CS PhD and I know many physics PhDs as well.)

200 points by electic 10y ago

Wow, too much data science/ machine learning hype into one article. If you are a Physicist that can make machine learning models doesn't that make you a coder also? Furthermore, they give two examples who weren't Computer Science students but I'm sure I can find a counterexample to this.

tresil 10y ago

Shameless clickbait. TL;DR: Some physicists have become software developers because it pays better than being a physicist. Physicists are smart people overall so they are well suited to solving complex problems that one encounters when developing software.

deleted 10y ago
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princeb 10y ago

move over javascript, matlab will soon rule silicon valley! edit: this is just a tongue in cheek comment that physicists will rule silicon valley with about the same chance of success matlab will be used for enterprise dev.

soVeryTired 10y ago
Move over matlab, numpy will soon rule data science!
- lotsoflumens 10y ago
  Javascript will use Numpy and then both will rule data science.
hprotagonist 10y ago
you must be thinking mechanical engineers. Real Physicists use fortran.
- asafira 10y ago
  Pencil and paper is where it's at.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

throwaway21211 10y ago

Confirmed by Netcraft.

KKKKkkkk1 10y ago

Physicists have been taking jobs as software engineers since the 90s. Career-wise, physics is the comparative literature of the exact sciences.

circlefavshape 10y ago
/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
- ythn 10y ago
  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.
  - snerbles 10y ago
    While you may not experience it, impostor syndrome is a documented phenomenon: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5116369/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5116369/ http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327752jpa5602_10 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327752jpa5602_... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2007.00318.x/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2007.... http://ejournals.swu.ac.th/index.php/jbse/article/view/1712 http://ejournals.swu.ac.th/index.php/jbse/article/view/1712
  - URSpider94 10y ago
    First, a tip -- if you genuinely want to learn more about something, don't start by saying it "seems bogus". Not the best way to open up a discussion. 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.

thesz 10y ago

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.

adrianN 10y ago
I'd become a physicist if there were jobs for physicists doing actual physics.
- thesz 10y ago
  Me (and you) can do theoretical work. Even nanomanipulators are DIY: http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2011-07/you-built-what-scanning-electron-microscope http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2011-07/you-built-what-sca... or http://hackaday.com/2015/01/13/cheap-diy-microscope-sees-individual-atoms/ http://hackaday.com/2015/01/13/cheap-diy-microscope-sees-ind... (ESM can be used to manipulate atoms) Yet I haven't had time or courage. Or badassness.
  - PeterisP 10y ago
    To work on theoretical physics, you anyway do need a job in physics or win the lottery - doing it as a hobby for 15 hours a week after a job doesn't count, to get anywhere you do need to be able to work on it full time for a few years.
    - thesz 10y ago
      And this is what I call lack of courage.
mac01021 10y ago
For some, that's because they're not badass enough. For many, it's because they never needed it.
musgravepeter 10y ago
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 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.

tmoot 10y ago

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 proposal writing) has always been hampering away at my free time to think. I really dislike this system. At the same time, I'm sure exists in industry too (never had a real job). I'm not going lie, I feel a bit trapped, but I'm still a fairly positive person. In the sciences, grad school is sold as a necessity but I'm starting to think this is a way of fueling the ivory tower. I realize that this is a bit incoherent/ranty, but whatever. :)

ddavis 10y ago
Also a physics PhD student. I never touched CS as un undergrad, but I got very interested in writing software as an undergrad when I started in an experimental HEP group (I've never taken any formal programming courses). I don't completely regret going to grad school even though I often think about the likelihood that I leave physics when I graduate to get a job in software development. I also dislike the academic system - and that's the biggest contributor to that likelihood to leave for the software industry being high. The physics itself is no longer _incredibly_ interesting to me, but I can't shake the data analysis itch ;)
physcab 10y ago
I was a Physics undergrad+ Physics / Materials Science PhD and I ended up just quitting 4 years into my PhD. You can do it too. You don't owe your advisor anything and you've definitely put in your indentured servitude. I ended up getting a job as a data analyst / scientist and never looked back. You can work on interesting problems, use the same experimental design knowledge and methods, and get paid $100k more than a grad student.
- koolba 10y ago
  Four years? Is it common for a Physics PhD to take that long? I thought most fields are closer to two years.

Jordrok 10y ago

Can confirm, have a physics PHD friend who is now doing primarily programming work. I, for one, welcome our new physicist overlords!

popobobo 10y ago
overlord is a strong word. As a physics major, I would prefer to be called a tech minion.

randlet 10y ago

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 (like me) whereas there are very many jobs available for fair to middling programmers (like me). Don't want to guess at numbers but my gut instinct & experience tells me that very few physicists end up doing physics and most end up in finance, software, and hardware.

jschwartzi 10y ago
The American Physical Society maintains numbers on career paths for their student members, and less than 5 percent end up with a Physicist job title. Most end up in the career paths you list.
- crazypyro 10y ago
  For anyone curious, here's a one year phd employment survey for physics: https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/statistics/employment/phdinitemp-p-14.pdf https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/statistics/employmen... 803 responses, 297 in potentially full-time positions. 62% (of all physics phds employed at potentially full-time positions) in non-physics field, break down by industry: Engineering - 20% Computer software - 14% Business or Finance - 11% Other sciences - 8% Education - 2% Medical services - 2% Other - 5%
  - NumberSix 10y ago
    The use of the phrase "potentially permanent positions" in the AIP report for industry positions, especially in the computer industry, is highly misleading. Academia, including some government labs and institutes, has tenured positions and other positions with guarantees of job security until retirement. The vast majority of industry employees are "at will" and can be laid off at any time for any reason or no reason. Senior executives often have employment contracts that take them out of the "at will" category but these rarely provide long term "permanent" status. Indeed, they can usually be fired by the Board of Directors. The computer industry is notoriously unstable with jobs often quite short term in practice, with layoffs common. Just to be clear, the referenced AIP report starts with the phrase: Positions accepted by PhD degree recipients following receipt of their degrees fall into three categories: postdoctoral fellowships, potentially permanent positions and other temporary positions. The figure on page two of the AIP report specifically lists a "private sector" block under "potentially permanent". Tabel 1 on page 3 lists 70 percent of potentially permanent positions as "private sector." Again this is very misleading as private sector positions are potentially permanent only is the sense that there is a small chance that you might continue at the same employer until retirement; there is nothing like a guarantee.

drallison 10y ago

Not a new phenomenon. Most super-programmers and computer scientists (especially greybeards) were trained a physicists.

redsymbol 10y ago

Anecdata: As a software engineer who studied physics before C.S., it feels like I've had a massively unfair advantage my entire career. Served me very well.

wwweston 10y ago
Can you describe the advantage? (Was within a hair of a physics minor before I studied C.S., but might have wiped out the advantage by switching to Mathematics?)
- sampo 10y ago
  Most of the CS students don't like math, so CS teaching has developed a tradition of only the minimal need-to-know math exposure. But then you have to always operate at the very edge of your math competence, because that is all you were taught. If you have a solid math foundation, then most of the math concepts you face in CS are well within your comfort zone.

jfe 10y ago

iirc dennis ritchie was an applied mathematician.

rubidium 10y ago

No real "news" here. 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-10/PhysPrivSect.pdf https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/statistics/phd-plus-...

ejrowley 10y ago

I studied physics, with intention of becoming a developer (which I did). I didn't have much appetite for a CS course and felt the physics would give me a broader set of skills.

FlorianRappl 10y ago
I followed a similar path and can only agree on the attitude. Most of the relevant CS knowledge is just that: knowledge. Studying physics is usually less about knowledge and more about general problem solving skills.
- niels_olson 10y ago
  I'd go beyond "general problem-solving skills". Physics gives you high quality math training (albeit somewhat truncated with respect to number theory), coupled with demanding experimental methods, and a deep, principled understanding of the foundations of the universe. Nothing is beyond your reach. Any other quantitative or logical discipline is just laying there, waiting for you.

roymurdock 10y ago

Anderson left Harvard before getting his PhD because he came to view the field much as Boykin does—as an intellectual pursuit of diminishing returns. But that’s not the case on the internet. “Implicit in ‘the internet’ is the scope, the coverage of it,” Anderson says. “It makes opportunities are much greater, but it also enriches the challenge space, the problem space. There is intellectual upside.” Was thinking of pursuing masters/PhD in economics but have heard/read a lot along the same lines of an intellectual pursuit with diminishing returns both in terms of salary and real world impact. The most useful thing I've done on Twitter is follow a bunch of economists and professors who are constantly debating current econ thinking/papers. There are a few I really respect, but for the most part both the academic environment for PhD level economists seems kind of toxic to me as an outsider. Been thinking a lot recently about how my generation (I'm 24) is going to have to be a lot more practical due to economic realities...

cinjon 10y ago
Who are the Econ people you're talking about on twitter?
- roymurdock 10y ago
  NR Kocherlakota (my favorite): https://twitter.com/kocherlakota009 https://twitter.com/kocherlakota009 Tim Duy: https://twitter.com/TimDuy https://twitter.com/TimDuy Claudia Sahm: https://twitter.com/Claudia_Sahm https://twitter.com/Claudia_Sahm Stephen Williamson: https://twitter.com/1954swilliamson https://twitter.com/1954swilliamson David Andolfatto: https://twitter.com/dandolfa https://twitter.com/dandolfa Tony Yates: https://twitter.com/t0nyyates https://twitter.com/t0nyyates Neel Kashkari: https://twitter.com/neelkashkari https://twitter.com/neelkashkari Noah Smith: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion https://twitter.com/Noahpinion Tyler Cowen: https://twitter.com/tylercowen https://twitter.com/tylercowen Justin Wolfers: https://twitter.com/JustinWolfers https://twitter.com/JustinWolfers Paul Romer: https://twitter.com/paulmromer https://twitter.com/paulmromer Jan Zilinsky: https://twitter.com/janzilinsky https://twitter.com/janzilinsky
  - 10y ago

Philomath 10y ago

Aerospace engineer here! Not a physicist and not that there's a lack of open jobs, but I was also way more interested in programming. I started my own project in 2nd year of university and it changed everything to me. I've been able to apply my knowledge during my years of university and also out of it with my side-projects.

zxcvvcxz 10y ago

Does anyone else think that general programming education (not necessarily computer science) is overrated? I much rather hire people that I know can think in both in terms of fundamental logical principles, and who understand the scientific method, which comes up more than one expects in business. For example, I've seen physicists run much better marketing analytics than "growth hackers". And who cares if someone can cross-off a list of generic programming language/frameworks? If you need that specific of a cog in your machine, the position probably isn't that innovative and you're better off outsourcing. Or hire someone smart and eager, pay them decently, and they'll learn what they need, if they're so inclined.

maxxxxx 10y ago
I would agree. I'd much rather deal with people who are good at math or know something about a particular industry. If you are a little disciplined and accept that there are some rules to follow learning software development is not that hard.
asafira 10y ago
How would you recommend searching for those sorts of roles that aren't just cog-in-a-machine but require a good bit of technical ability and creativity on the job? No offense, but if you look at most job listings (even on hacker news), they often specifically mention technologies and languages one should already have a background in, and it's definitely not clear they would take someone that has succeeded in differing technical challenges.
- zxcvvcxz 10y ago
  A lot of employers will list too much stuff just because it's an ingrained habit. In my experience, both as an employee and employer who used to do this to some extent, these requirement lists are fairly 'negotiable'. If you have the top 2-3 things they'd need (e.g. CS algorithms knowledge + some scripting language + some database experience), and are otherwise a good applicant, go ahead and apply with the mindset being that you'd have no problem picking up other frameworks X,Y,Z. Of course, spend an evening to take a look at them and be confident enough to make that the case.

m23khan 10y ago

I myself have only a CS background (BSc + MSc in CS), and I am working in IT for last 8 years. Initially, I used to have negative opinion towards people from other non-CS backgrounds able to get jobs as Software Engineers and as IT Managers/Directors. Now for the past 5 years, I am highly appreciative of such people because each of them bring knowledge and interesting viewpoints from their respective academic/training backgrounds which serves to enrich the IT world. Thank you guys :-)

NumberSix 10y ago

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 physicists decamped for Bell Labs, mostly to work on computer and telecommunications related activities. A high profile example is Emanuel Derman, author of My Life as a Quant (2004) and later books, who worked at Bell Labs from 1980 to 1985 before moving on to Wall Street. He mentions quite a number of other physicists at Bell Labs at the same time. Most physicists end up in some sort of software development. The high profile "quant" jobs are actually rather rare and hard to get. The Wall Street firms are typically going after very strong physicists, especially theoretical physicists like Derman. Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft and Intellectual Ventures fame (or infamy) has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Princeton. Did not go to Wall Street. :-) The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produced a huge surplus of experimental particle physics (high energy physics) Ph.D.'s with no jobs in the field. Experimental particle physics involves large amounts of software development for data acquisition, instrument monitoring and control, and data analysis, mostly in C and C++, although there is still some "legacy" FORTRAN software. The heyday of FORTRAN in physics was a long time ago. Although there have been attempts to use neural networks and other machine learning methods in particle physics, the workhorse of data analysis in the field is Ronald Fisher's maximum likelihood estimation and classification -- primarily estimation of parameters such as the mass and width of the Higgs Boson. The discovery of the Higgs was a maximum likelihood analysis. Although it is undoubtedly possible to map maximum likelihood onto neural networks, in practice they are different. Neural networks are an attempt to simulate the low level structure of the neurons in the brain and solve problems by brute force fitting of data to models with huge numbers of adjustable parameters. In contrast, maximum likelihood involves attempts to understand the phenomenon under study and model it as a small number of functions corresponding to higher level concepts such as the Higgs Boson. A neural net could exactly fit the Higgs Boson peak yet never produce or confirm a physical model of what causes the peak.

batbomb 10y ago
Part of that is because there was only physics and math degrees up to around the 60s. There wasn't really EE or CS, and even when there was, most the professors were originally trained as physicists.

deepnotderp 10y ago

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

montecarl 10y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited-memory_BFGS
- throwaway61AR 10y ago
  Yep this was used by Jeff Dean et al. in one of Google Brain's earlier experiments https://research.google.com/archive/large_deep_networks_nips2012.html https://research.google.com/archive/large_deep_networks_nips...

tehwalrus 10y ago

Did physics undergrad, worked as a developer for a couple of years, then did a computational physics PhD, now firmly back as a developer. I would do open ended research if there were any jobs going, but there generally aren't. And I'd be just as happy in computer science as physics.

cowmix 10y ago

Same as it ever was. All my best developers over the past 25 years I've managed were either physicists or mathematicians.

CalRobert 10y ago

This starts pretty early. I mean, would you rather be treated like dirt doing your prof's work for her or him for poverty-level wages (if any!) or making a decent income as a CS intern? I got my undergrad in physics, but spent all of my free time (and a lot of what probably should have been study-time) teaching myself to code. It had a pretty brutal impact on my GPA, but I've no regrets.

dkarapetyan 10y ago

Mathematicians as well. It's not just physicists. In fact any of the STEM fields is a valid path to software engineering.

elliott34 10y ago

Doesn't really seem like the author spoke to a lot of actual physicists to write this article. Don't get me wrong, physics majors attract a certain type of intellect, but the vast majority of curriculum (quantum, EM, mechanics) are things THAT HAVE BARELY CHANGED IN THE PAST 50 YEARS. Meanwhile, CS majors come out much more prepared and hirable on the job market. As far as the machine learning market goes, 90% of the projects require software engineering skills, the last 10% requires being able to go underneath the covers of linear algebra libraries, etc. I just think the whole physics>cs degree for machine learning argument is not totally persuasive given my experience.

woah 10y ago
They have to turn it into some kind of story with more excitement and conflict than "some people who are good at math are getting jobs as engineers".
vitaminbandit 10y ago
How is the notion that "the vast majority of curriculum (quantum, EM, mechanics) are things THAT HAVE BARELY CHANGED IN THE PAST 50 YEARS" relevant to this discussion?
- elliott34 10y ago
  Because the author draws a lot of parallels between computer science majors and physics majors, citing that physics majors are better prepared for the type of work ML requires. I am a physics major turned data scientist, and my argument is that I would have better prepared having been a CS major, given what the majority of my work requires. While in a CS major, a lot of data structures and algorithms haven't changed in 50 years either, you're much more likely to take electives with marketable skills or with up-to-date technologies (distributed systems, operating systems, OO/fp, databases, concurrency) that would've helped me in my day to day more than a math course or too did during my physics degree.

asafira 10y ago

Whoa! I am actually currently in a physics PhD program, in my last 1-2 years, and have been pursuing internship opportunities for the summer. For me, I've actually wanted to get my PhD in physics and then work in tech for as long as I can remember (so it's not primarily that I feel like the academic job market is too competitive for me, or doesn't pay enough, but those are pretty good reasons, too...) . I actually have often found it awkward to fit into the usual computer science bins that companies organize projects into. In addition to a hefty amount of data analysis and software engineering, my PhD has required knowledge from a wide variety of different types of engineering, including optics, microwave engineering, and semiconductor fabrication. Combining everything into a 1-page resume, I've found it's not super obvious where my placement would be within most companies. I am currently in the team-matching phase for a google internship, for example, but haven't heard anything. For those that are getting themselves in the door, do you have any tips?

santaclaus 10y ago
> For those that are getting themselves in the door, do you have any tips? I have no tips, but a guide to dealing with recruiters (who are typically pattern matching for the framework du jour) for developers from a (hard) science background would be really cool!
emcq 10y ago
Craft your resume around the job you want. Add in the other details to fit. If you dont know what you want, do more internships, soul searching, or perhaps even explore career coaches. The best thing getting my food in the door in silicon valley was to move there; quite a few opportunities for qualified candidates afterwards. Even research labs at Stanford or Cal still value hiring the broad experiences you describe and could be a foot in the door.
alexyim 10y ago
Have you thought about de-emphasizing the less relevant experiences? Find the companies you're interested in, tailor your resumé to be mostly what is applicable, and then hint at your expanded experience. As an example, a one-liner on "optics, microwave engineering, and semiconductor fabrication" says a lot already.

renlo 10y ago

I'm working on a Masters in CS right now and have been interested in heading into some form of 'Data Science', whatever that may entail. Does this mean that only physics/math/stats majors are getting into this field? At my current place of employment this is the case for the data scientists; all have an academic background in one of these three fields, all have a Masters or PhD. I assumed this was because the head data scientist had a long history with academia and thus had a predilection for academics. From my experience the data science concepts I have encountered thus-far seem pretty straightforward and I suspect that people are trying to make these concepts seem more difficult/arcane than they are by using notations/concepts only learned in academia. Am I wrong here? Is it actually a field which requires a PhD in Math to understand? My exposure has only been with toy examples (logistic regression, simple perceptrons, similarity algorithms, etc). How easy is it to get into the field without a heavy academic background?

grillvogel 10y ago

its really great that our world's top scientists are working on ad monetization

return0 10y ago

Strange how the article doesn't mention that (not Hinton), Hopfield, Sejnowski, Kohonen , Amari etc. etc. were all phycisists. Also, physicists working for software is not only a silicon-valley phenomenon .

p1esk 10y ago
Hinton was never a physicist.

eva1984 10y ago

> In other words, all the physicists pushing into the realm of the Silicon Valley engineer is a sign of a much bigger change to come. So this article comes all the way to this. Is there data that hiring of physicists speeded up in the recent years? And why roles they are taken? Presumably not all in machine learning, if I have to guess. Until then, this is another effort to turn an otherwise good interview into an unsubstantiated editorial aiming for nothing but hype.

throw_away_777 10y ago
Most physicists who recently graduated who I know (who don't do a postdoc) have transitioned or are looking to transition into data science. I am in the looking to transition group, so my sample may be biased though.

emcq 10y ago

There was a time before computer science degrees existed. Guess who were some the first folks to use computers and pioneer our field? Physicists and mathematicians! Von Neumann, Feynman, Metropolis, Vapnik, Babagge, Lovelace, Turing, Church, Hopper, Brooks...

loblollyboy 10y ago

I didn't study CS, I more use software (like django) than build it, and, in fact, probably misuse it. But the few plasma physics classes I took for my MS are an order of magnitude more complex than any programming I have ever done.

akhilcacharya 10y ago

I'm surprised that this is surprising. Physics as a career doesn't pay terribly well, but as a degree offers a very wide breadth in coursework and skills. Grad students in particular usually have experience in HPC, for instance.

amai 10y ago

Wired: "Move Over, Coders—Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley" And soon we will rule the world, muhahaha...!

Koshkin 10y ago
> Move Over, Coders "Coders" - sure, but not software engineers. Incidentally, the skill of "coding" (i.e. using a programming language to automate tasks on a computer) should, in my opinion, be taught in school at an early age along with the multiplication table.

amai 10y ago

While being a student a physics professor told me: "Study physics now. Because later when you have a job, you might get paid to learn using some software tool or a new programming language. But no company will ever send you into a quantum mechanics lecture. " He was right.

throwaway61AR 10y ago
No he wasn't. At the google X labs we had a quantum mechanics lecture from a guest speaker, literally only a couple of months back.
- eanzenberg 10y ago
  1 lecture at arguably undergrad level vs. 30 lectures (2 semesters) of grad level qm
analog31 10y ago
Oddly enough, I received similar advice from my parents, 35 years ago when I started college. This was of course just at the dawn of the personal computer age. My mom was teaching programming at a nearby college, and she literally thought that programming was too easy to spend 4 years learning in the classroom. People were getting programming jobs after one year in her course. Also, nobody had any idea where the industry, or the economy, were headed. Both of my parents started their careers as scientists in industry after getting graduate degrees in the 50s. They saw people with science background being able to go into practically anything, including programming, business, entrepreneurship, and so forth. I learned programming in high school, and fell in love with it, but I had an internship at a computer facility, and also looked ahead at the typical CS curriculum. It all seemed terribly boring. So I majored in math and physics. Oddly enough, the people who were doing things with computers, that interested me, were in the physics department. I developed the ability to design computerized electronics for measurement and control systems -- which became my career. This was even before "embedded systems" was widely taught in EE departments. But realistically, a large portion of the software industry today does not require people with a science background. What I don't know is if I'd still find it boring. Perhaps my parents' attitude was along the line of "you can do anything with a liberal arts education," but with the stipulation that the liberal arts include math and science.

biggerfisch 10y ago

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.

Koshkin 10y ago

The effort one has to put into getting a physics degree seems to me comparable to that of becoming a physician (a medical doctor), and it pains me to see all that effort wasted. Some argue that it is the acquired skill in solving problems that matters, but, having seen physicists and mathematicians (and even "computer scientists") by training trying to solve software engineering problems, I have to disagree. Likewise, from what I have also observed, problem solving skills of a good software engineer may not be by themselves all that useful when trying to tackle problems in physics and mathematics.

FrostyElsa 10y ago
We need more physicists so we can prove the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics so I can travel to the world where I'm a billionaire.

lowbloodsugar 10y ago

Physics major here, but programming since age 11. I wasn't a fan of how CS was taught to my friends, but undeniably there is so much incredibly important knowledge in CS that you won't get in a Physics degree. Such important works as the Dragon compiler book, Introductions to Algorithms, SICP, the Purity Test. Since coursera came along, I've found a number of online courses absolutely mind-altering. Basically, to my fellow physicists: yes, you are a smarty pants, but respect the body of CS knowledge and learn it.

ExcessiveAccts 10y ago

I don't get it. I'm studying physics because I want to help shed light on the mysteries of reality. It might be hard to get a job in physics and achieve that, but it's a hell of a lot harder to get in a job in software development and achieve that. Despite this, all I'm reading is optimism about how well-paying and interesting software development is for physicists. So what? If those were my primary concerns, I wouldn't have studied physics in the first place! I get the hidden impression that the meaningfulness of science -- pursuing the truth, the nature of the universe -- is being swept under the rug because it's no longer paying the bills. That's a goddamn tragedy, not the cause for celebration this article is making it out to be.

FiatLuxDave 10y ago
Don't give up. It is possible to have a career in physics. It's not the easy path: academia has its many challenges, and software is in it's glory days. But the Universe is still there, and there is still so much to learn.

bondolo 10y ago

Considering how competitive physics graduate programs are at top schools it is a shame to hear that so few are pursuing careers in physics and some appear to be calculating in advance their move to CS. I love CS but if I had a passion for physics I would be pissed to see someone that society, schools, mentors, peers have invested in to do physics go be quant at an investment bank. It is not that working for a bank is intrinsically bad, more the case that individuals should consider the opportunity they may have been taking from others in pursuing a specialized education they subsequently don't use.

Diederich 10y ago

I sat right next to a really smart guy who was a hadoop administrator. Turns out he got a PhD in theoretical physics and did some graduate work at Fermilab. Holy crap...this run of the mill Hadoop administrator is some kind of physics genius. I asked him why....he said that his true love, particle physics, just didn't pay the bills like any random IT related job does. Which is a damn shame. PS: While we were talking, a dude one row over popped up and said he had a PhD in Chemistry or something.

mizzao 10y ago

Is there a huge difference between physics PhDs and computer science PhDs in this argument? Both are overspecialized in their research, but both also have a wide range of skills in programming, abstract problem solving, writing, communication, and so on. Both will likely have high-level knowledge of a variety of machine learning methods, except the CS PhD that actually published machine learning research who will know a bit more about some very specific topics. (I'm a CS PhD and I know many physics PhDs as well.)