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Going into HPC for the aerospace industry is more of a dream job, end game goal than something I'd get into quickly. But generally speaking I'm tired of doing s

Going into HPC for the aerospace industry is more of a dream job, end game goal than something I'd get into quickly. But generally speaking I'm tired of doing small-scale work and want to become trained and knowledgeable in programming for large-scale systems where performance optimization is crucial. Whatever that entails. I've read short experiences of BS students getting internships at NVidia and that stuff inspires me. Starting from a entry level salary rank is also actually a non-issue for me. My jobs pay little (I guess it correlates with low-quality experience). An entry-level job at a reputable tech company will probably pay more than most companies have paid me in my entire career. I'm talking $20-$25/hr 1099 contract jobs here. In between I have no work, so it ends up like living paycheck to paycheck. The main thing that has driven me towards considering the education option is that students get viewed in a different frame of mind by companies. Companies evaluate students and new grads by their potential. People whose skills have gotten stale or incompatible need training, but training is almost exclusively given to new grads. So that's another plus for returning to school. Right now I have temporary "project burnout" to push on to doing a new project, and think a change of personal experience would be beneficial to me.

JamesBarney 9y ago
Why do you want to be in the aerospace industry? It is a very long, and risky path to get there. Do you just want more challenging work? Do you want to do more math and less coding? You can more easily accomplish these goals. And in terms of opportunity cost remember just cause you made $20-25 the last few years doesn't mean you will make that much over the next 4 years you would be going to school. And if you are willing to work hard you could be making six figures in two years by staying in web or moving to mobile. Also your ideas of training in the software world are way off base. I don't know any devs who are any good from training. For instance I did well getting a CS degree from a reputable state school, all my project and test scores were in the 90s.(UT Austin) But I didn't know how to program my way out of a paper bag. I learned this the hard way, failing spectacularly at my first internship. So I spent the next year working as hard as I could at learning how to develop. It was all self-training and it made a world of difference. You'll find that all the best devs are voracious auto-didacts. 95% of all learning that happens in software is reading websites, books, and trial and error, not being sat down and trained how to do something. And the 5% who rely on training are usually pretty shitty devs, because you can't grow very quickly as a dev relying on other people to train you. The spoon fed training usually isn't that good, or complete. To be honest I don't know any devs who could even be generously called mediocre who relied on training/teaching to be good.
- djellybeans 9y ago
  Space science is something that greatly interests me and I'd like to get employed in aerospace contributing to space exploration. HFT for fluid simulations is just one example, but there are several other ways I'm open to getting into. Other examples include providing support for processing telemetry data, or embedded programming for the on-board hardware in launch systems. If I will return to school, I will try to get into a good internship each summer. Many internships already pay higher hourly wages than the $20-25 I have been getting paid. I am very self-taught myself, but as you can see it hasn't led me to a good career. Being the lone developer is actually a bad thing in the long run, and I learned the hard way that if you're the smartest person in the team, you should move up to a different team or a different company. I learn better by working with someone that can kick my ass at software development most of the time. I don't even know how to write unit tests! But I'm also talking about the training done at big companies like Google. I expect their sort of infrastructure and resources to be top of the line.

JamesBarney 9y ago

Why do you want to be in the aerospace industry? It is a very long, and risky path to get there. Do you just want more challenging work? Do you want to do more math and less coding? You can more easily accomplish these goals. And in terms of opportunity cost remember just cause you made $20-25 the last few years doesn't mean you will make that much over the next 4 years you would be going to school. And if you are willing to work hard you could be making six figures in two years by staying in web or moving to mobile. Also your ideas of training in the software world are way off base. I don't know any devs who are any good from training. For instance I did well getting a CS degree from a reputable state school, all my project and test scores were in the 90s.(UT Austin) But I didn't know how to program my way out of a paper bag. I learned this the hard way, failing spectacularly at my first internship. So I spent the next year working as hard as I could at learning how to develop. It was all self-training and it made a world of difference. You'll find that all the best devs are voracious auto-didacts. 95% of all learning that happens in software is reading websites, books, and trial and error, not being sat down and trained how to do something. And the 5% who rely on training are usually pretty shitty devs, because you can't grow very quickly as a dev relying on other people to train you. The spoon fed training usually isn't that good, or complete. To be honest I don't know any devs who could even be generously called mediocre who relied on training/teaching to be good.

djellybeans 9y ago
Space science is something that greatly interests me and I'd like to get employed in aerospace contributing to space exploration. HFT for fluid simulations is just one example, but there are several other ways I'm open to getting into. Other examples include providing support for processing telemetry data, or embedded programming for the on-board hardware in launch systems. If I will return to school, I will try to get into a good internship each summer. Many internships already pay higher hourly wages than the $20-25 I have been getting paid. I am very self-taught myself, but as you can see it hasn't led me to a good career. Being the lone developer is actually a bad thing in the long run, and I learned the hard way that if you're the smartest person in the team, you should move up to a different team or a different company. I learn better by working with someone that can kick my ass at software development most of the time. I don't even know how to write unit tests! But I'm also talking about the training done at big companies like Google. I expect their sort of infrastructure and resources to be top of the line.