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Looking at the careers of mathematicians who turned software developers after putting minimal effort into CS courses, they all make CRUD work for insurance sect
by sshine 1y ago
Looking at the careers of mathematicians who turned software developers after putting minimal effort into CS courses, they all make CRUD work for insurance sector consulting companies. The pay is fine, but the work is absolutely dreadfully predictable. I'm sure that kind of work is automatable before anything where you solve a hard problem.
Not to discourage choosing math over CS, of course.
You just have to do it for the right reason: Because math is friggin' cool, and programming is easier to learn on your own than math, and there is a skill transfer that goes from math to programming that doesn't go the other way.
- trenchpilgrim 1y agoI haven't had _any_ jobs where the programming involved solving hard problems, TBH. The hard part of my job is dealing with people and regulatory environments. The code is basically trivial. I don't really mind it either, if I want to do something novel I do things on my own.
- pepa65 1y agoThe majority of coding or software engineering jobs are not about solving hard problems. Just implementing stuff, getting ideas to work. I agree that most of the code will be trivial.
- sshine 1y agoI’ve selected for interesting work primarily by working for R&D departments, for sketchy startups, and in niche domains. The cost has been that I don’t have deep domain knowledge that could lead to making a startup myself. And it’s the kind of stuff with few or no examples of anywhere, so no LLM help. For example, building cryptographic primitives for a custom zero-knowledge VM in the VM’s own esoteric assembler language. Nothing closely resembles it.
- trenchpilgrim 1y agoYeah, my preference is to have stable, "easy" work so I can have steady income for 5+ years per job, then I do all my weird mad science stuff solo and have full control of the resulting interesting work.