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I work on commercial physics solvers (mostly fluids) and engineering design optimization code. Game programming seems like the only other thing I’d ever want t

by tobmlt 6y ago

I work on commercial physics solvers (mostly fluids) and engineering design optimization code. Game programming seems like the only other thing I’d ever want to do, programming wise. Maybe optimization but really even machine learning is pretty ho hum in comparison. All that data wrangling... I guess “we” pay for the fun with lower salaries and/or poorer work life balance. At least sometimes, eh hem.

mywittyname 6y ago
The best job I ever had was working on computer-aided engineering software. It was a difficult job that you did with a ton of really bright people, it paid quite well, and it was very low stress. The only gotcha is you can't really transfer those skills into other jobs, and the market for computational physics is rather sparse.
- tobmlt 6y ago
  Yeah, you hit the nail on the head there. the sparsity makes me nervous. Combine that with the fact that I recently changed jobs from a very low stress position where I was basically calling the technical shots for myself to one where I am micromanaged to the half day time step... (I did this to myself in order to broaden and deepen my computational resume.) I sleep a lot less this year than last.
turing_complete 6y ago
My first job after university actually was a ML/data science job at a smaller company. The interesting / challenging part was actually understanding the problem domain and how we could actually leverage data, the technical and algorithmical challenges were, for the most part, pretty easy. It was mostly data wrangling and importing some classifier or regressor from scikit-learn. Of course, there are also super interesting and technically challenging jobs in ML out there.
- tobmlt 6y ago
  Yeah, maybe something with differential geometry and ML would be fun. I’ve also built a system for composing relations and generating gradients from a computational graph...(for CAD design generation) Maybe I should look at working on a framework project. Whatever the theano folks are doing nowadays - or the like.

by tobmlt 6y ago

mywittyname 6y ago

The best job I ever had was working on computer-aided engineering software. It was a difficult job that you did with a ton of really bright people, it paid quite well, and it was very low stress. The only gotcha is you can't really transfer those skills into other jobs, and the market for computational physics is rather sparse.

tobmlt 6y ago
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head there. the sparsity makes me nervous. Combine that with the fact that I recently changed jobs from a very low stress position where I was basically calling the technical shots for myself to one where I am micromanaged to the half day time step... (I did this to myself in order to broaden and deepen my computational resume.) I sleep a lot less this year than last.

turing_complete 6y ago

My first job after university actually was a ML/data science job at a smaller company. The interesting / challenging part was actually understanding the problem domain and how we could actually leverage data, the technical and algorithmical challenges were, for the most part, pretty easy. It was mostly data wrangling and importing some classifier or regressor from scikit-learn. Of course, there are also super interesting and technically challenging jobs in ML out there.

tobmlt 6y ago
Yeah, maybe something with differential geometry and ML would be fun. I’ve also built a system for composing relations and generating gradients from a computational graph...(for CAD design generation) Maybe I should look at working on a framework project. Whatever the theano folks are doing nowadays - or the like.