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Ask HN: Looking for Junior Developer Vacancy for a University Level Maths Tutor

1 points by mfbx9da4 4y ago

My friend is looking to pivot careers from being a maths tutor for university students. He's been a tutor for a number of years and has a very high level of maths but he's looking for something a bit more stable. He likes the idea of coding and has started down the route of being a web developer. I'm sure he'll be a rockstar developer with some experience under his belt but getting the right first job is the toughest. Anybody out there hiring junior web developers, ideally in London UK? Or recommendations where to look?

brutus1213 4y ago
Being a web developer is a terrible waste of talent if your friend is truly good at University level maths. Can I suggest he consider data science or deep learning? Check out coursera/deeplearning.ai's moocs; he can get a feel for it by going to youtube and checking out similar material.
- mfbx9da4 4y ago
  Yeah I 100% feel the same! He read an entire book on "Mathematics for Machine Learning" which he found pretty easy. He skimmed over the "now let's apply this in code" sections but the maths behind it all was fine. The pros of starting in web dev is he should be able to get an entry level role pretty quickly, it's probably the biggest market and he does find it interesting. My belief is that as long as you keep digging you'll find a rabbit hole in any area of programming and his skills will be valuable there. e.g. in web dev you can move into cryptography, WASM, encodings, color spaces, parsers, compilers etc etc. Also, while it's good to have an understanding of the maths when doing data science stuff you're not that likely to be actually using or innovating the maths and most of your time will be spent cleaning data and importing libraries? Also he's more of a pure maths abstract algebra guy and less interested in stats. The cons of starting with web dev is that you're way less likely to need his maths skills.
elviejo 4y ago
I would recommend he studies Haskell, which has been called: "executable maths" In that stack his previous experience is extremely valuable and will make his learning path a lot easier. For web development he can start with IHP framework and for deployment NixOS.
- mfbx9da4 4y ago
  That's an excellent suggestion! I would be a little concerned about the market demand for Haskell developers?

1 points by mfbx9da4 4y ago

brutus1213 4y ago

Being a web developer is a terrible waste of talent if your friend is truly good at University level maths. Can I suggest he consider data science or deep learning? Check out coursera/deeplearning.ai's moocs; he can get a feel for it by going to youtube and checking out similar material.

mfbx9da4 4y ago
Yeah I 100% feel the same! He read an entire book on "Mathematics for Machine Learning" which he found pretty easy. He skimmed over the "now let's apply this in code" sections but the maths behind it all was fine. The pros of starting in web dev is he should be able to get an entry level role pretty quickly, it's probably the biggest market and he does find it interesting. My belief is that as long as you keep digging you'll find a rabbit hole in any area of programming and his skills will be valuable there. e.g. in web dev you can move into cryptography, WASM, encodings, color spaces, parsers, compilers etc etc. Also, while it's good to have an understanding of the maths when doing data science stuff you're not that likely to be actually using or innovating the maths and most of your time will be spent cleaning data and importing libraries? Also he's more of a pure maths abstract algebra guy and less interested in stats. The cons of starting with web dev is that you're way less likely to need his maths skills.

elviejo 4y ago

I would recommend he studies Haskell, which has been called: "executable maths" In that stack his previous experience is extremely valuable and will make his learning path a lot easier. For web development he can start with IHP framework and for deployment NixOS.

mfbx9da4 4y ago
That's an excellent suggestion! I would be a little concerned about the market demand for Haskell developers?