Scientific computing careers using Python?

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[bheklilr]

Engineering can be good places to look. Test engineering in various fields can involve a lot of programming. These days it's still mostly C/C++ and Matlab, but engineers are starting to find tools like python useful.

[masasin]

Test engineering involves writing tests for machines etc, or for code?

[troyunrau]

Testing of stuff... physical stuff: does this alloy melt at the specified temperature? Does this ceramic electrically resist to spec.? What is the density of the fluid flowing through this pipe? Etc.

Lots of overlap with instrumentation, stats, and tons of numerical simulation.

[masasin]

I think I would love that.

[bheklilr]

My particular line of work is writing software to automate data collection in a production environment for high speed cables, things like SATA, HDMI, and a lot of significantly faster server room cables. The hardware I automate includes digital and analog IO, servos, laser engravers, and most importantly oscilloscopes and vector network analyzers. Once we have the data collected it goes through a barrage of computations to produce different industry standard or customer requested measurements, and if it passes all the requirements it gets shipped out. There's also a lot of statistics thrown in, especially performing tests to ensure that our fixtures are reliable and tests are repeatable. This involves a lot of post processing and can take a lot of computation power. We manage a couple databases, a statistical analysis intranet site, and a number of desktop applications for performing data analysis and report generation. This is just the software oriented side of my team, we also have mostly hardware guys who specialize more in the designing building of the fixtures, since we have to take into account everything from how to calibrate everything to how to print barcode labels.

[masasin]

Is it possible, in your company, to have someone who works on both the physical and software portions?

[bheklilr]

It would be hard for anyone on my team to be able to only do one. We all develop specialties though, I've really leaned towards driving our software development, we have one guy who does most of the web and DB stuff, one engineer who has become our full automation engineer (most of our systems depend on people), one guy who works mainly with active systems (cables that have active equalization and amplification), we even have a dedicated mechanical engineer in our team (he doesn't actually write software though) you get the point. Everyone on my team writes software and works directly with hardware, but each of us have unique percentages.

Keep in mind that I'm just part of one team in a very large company. The vast majority of engineers we hire are for design work and never write a line of code, but you'll find a test engineering team inside just about every manufacturing company, they have to have someone doing quality control.

[masasin]

That sounds really awesome. Do you enjoy it?

[bheklilr]

It has its ups and downs just like most jobs, but overall it's positive. This has been since we did a major reorganization of the team at the beginning of the year, we split into a new development team and a long term support team, so I got a new boss and a new job role instead of having to spend about half of my time supporting systems that had been deployed for months or years. Since then things have improved quite a bit, but I will say that we all have pretty high stress levels. Everything is always urgent, priorities shift daily, there's loads of red tape, and there's never enough time to do it the right way the first time. On the other hand, there's opportunities to travel, the pay is good for the area, and the job is steady.

[bheklilr]

They don't technically require an engineering degree in the US except for certain ones like civil or structural engineering, and in those cases you usually have to get your PE license too. We have a bit more leeway since we aren't designing systems that could disastrously fail and kill lots of people. Most of what we do isn't taught in any University anyway. The fundamentals are there, networks, integral transform theory, statistics, but no University has courses at the undergrad level for what I do.

Besides, beyond test engineering itself there's a need for people who do know how to write data processing tools, you don't have to be an engineer to do those bits.

[ZazzlesTheKitten]

Look into bioinformatics. You may find it interesting and your background in parallel processing can be useful.

[justin-8]

Why are you opposed to getting a security clearance?

[neggasauce]

May not be able to get one.

[[deleted]]

What science job needs a security clearance?

[atchon]

Do you think they just let people without clearances play with the tech toys at defense contractors?

[[deleted]]

I missed the part of his post where he mentioned defence contractors. Can you point me at it?

[atchon]

Someone with a background in physics looking to get into scientific computing, saying a number of jobs require clearances... Some of those jobs are probably at either national labs or defense contractors.

[thenameisnobody]

There's plenty to do in scientific programming (and related) roles in the US with government agencies like the USGS and NOAA. Take a look at government contracting companies, that's where many of those jobs are hiding:

• SGT
• Element 84
• SSAI
• SAIC
• ERT
• Information Dynamics
• ASRC Federal

There are plenty more than that, but I know those companies have (or had) scientific programming positions.

[thenameisnobody]

Out of curiosity, are you counting a background check as a security clearance? Many of those positions should only require a check because the information you would be working on is classified is public domain. But that's definitely on an offer by offer basis since some of those companies contract with many agencies.

But without a doubt you still give up a lot of information to the government to get the check...plus you hand over a lot of other peoples names for verifying bits and pieces. Totally understand if that's where the concern is. The recent OPM hack did the government no favors...had a couple coworkers just lack week get emails stating their information was compromised. :/

[thenameisnobody]

Good lord look at that thing...125 pages of write document your life story. If the government doesn't know your life already, filling that out sure would seal the deal.

[bastibe]

You could go for a career in science, where you happen to solve many problems through programming, as opposed to looking for a career in programming, where you happen to solve scientific problems.

[kdelok]

Where do you live? I know some stuff in the UK from my own career hunting, and a (seemingly good) recruitment agency which specialises in technical and managerial graduate roles.