4 ms·

This resonates so strongly with me. I'm a modeler and best described as a lifelong scientific programmer. I'm much, much better at doing the specialty science

by toddm 4y ago

This resonates so strongly with me. I'm a modeler and best described as a lifelong scientific programmer. I'm much, much better at doing the specialty science I was trained to do and have done than write unit tests (for Jupyter notebooks? why?) or struggle through big-O questions (again, why? I write ~100 line programs that are never production code). Like the author of the post, I am not a professional developer and don't pretend to be or want to be. There are people out there way better than me for doing those jobs. Recently, I interviewed for a role as a computational chemist - this is an ideal fit for a person like me with the domain knowledge, advanced degree in the subject area, passion, and a proven (if dated) track record of publishing in the domain. The idea is to use software, amend what's there if/when needed, and apply my knowledge to the process and what comes out of it. What did the interview start with? A surprise interactive coding challenge that I wasn't prepared for, and thankfully the interviewer was kind and professional enough to understand that my value-add is in, well, computational chemistry and not in the details covered by a CS major. I thought Jesus, I bet not a single software engineer at this company got asked to do a simple organic synthesis or even a redox problem during their interview process.

feoren 4y ago
> I bet not a single software engineer at this company got asked to do a simple organic synthesis or even a redox problem during their interview process. Well they should have! One of the most important traits for a good software engineer is to be able to pick up a working understanding of the domain they're programming in. If they can't do that, they're more likely to make negative contributions than any positive ones.
hnfong 4y ago
I might be reading too much into your story, but if your CV indicates that you're "much better at doing the specialty science I was trained to do and have done than" CS stuff, a good interviewer might be concerned whether you had the necessary CS knowledge / programming skills. To me at least, an interview is not to flatter the candidate by asking questions they're most comfortable with, but to make sure they have the requisite skills expected for the job. If the job expects X, Y and Z, and they seem like they're good at X and Y, you spend the time checking whether they're reasonably competent at Z as well.
- toddm 4y ago
  My CV is 7 pages long. In my case, the ~30 years of experience I've had as a software developer, data scientist, assistant professor, and quantitative researcher - not to mention my refereed publications in several computation-heavy areas - should be proof enough that I possess the minimal amount of programming skills for the job. Either that or I've been pulling the wool over everyone's eyes for 3 decades. In my present and past experience, the asymmetry of what is required for a computational scientist (the science, the programming, the CS whiteboard stuff) vs. software engineer (software engineering) is quite pronounced. YMMV.

by toddm 4y ago

feoren 4y ago

> I bet not a single software engineer at this company got asked to do a simple organic synthesis or even a redox problem during their interview process. Well they should have! One of the most important traits for a good software engineer is to be able to pick up a working understanding of the domain they're programming in. If they can't do that, they're more likely to make negative contributions than any positive ones.

hnfong 4y ago

I might be reading too much into your story, but if your CV indicates that you're "much better at doing the specialty science I was trained to do and have done than" CS stuff, a good interviewer might be concerned whether you had the necessary CS knowledge / programming skills. To me at least, an interview is not to flatter the candidate by asking questions they're most comfortable with, but to make sure they have the requisite skills expected for the job. If the job expects X, Y and Z, and they seem like they're good at X and Y, you spend the time checking whether they're reasonably competent at Z as well.

toddm 4y ago
My CV is 7 pages long. In my case, the ~30 years of experience I've had as a software developer, data scientist, assistant professor, and quantitative researcher - not to mention my refereed publications in several computation-heavy areas - should be proof enough that I possess the minimal amount of programming skills for the job. Either that or I've been pulling the wool over everyone's eyes for 3 decades. In my present and past experience, the asymmetry of what is required for a computational scientist (the science, the programming, the CS whiteboard stuff) vs. software engineer (software engineering) is quite pronounced. YMMV.