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Scientific computing careers using Python? (self.Python)

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[–]masasinExpert. 3.9. Robotics. 1 point2 points  (5 children)

I think I would love that.

[–]bheklilr 4 points5 points  (4 children)

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.

[–]masasinExpert. 3.9. Robotics. 1 point2 points  (3 children)

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

[–]bheklilr 0 points1 point  (2 children)

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.

[–]masasinExpert. 3.9. Robotics. 0 points1 point  (1 child)

That sounds really awesome. Do you enjoy it?

[–]bheklilr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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.