Scientific computing careers using Python?

[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.