Comment by eric_bullington | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eric_bullington | Hacker News Reader

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eric_bullington

I'm with you. This is the second time I'm reading about this niche and would love to find out more info about getting into the field.

I used to work as a scientific/medical translator and one of the things I loved about my work then was that with each new project, I had to learn enough about a new topic/subfield to become a bit of an pseudo-expert in it. I greatly enjoyed that research and would love to do some work in software development that would require the same type of constant learning with each new project. Diving into some convoluted, 20-year-old Fortran driving highly-specialized scientific software actually sounds kind of exciting to me (yeah, I'm not normal either :) ).

Is there much demand for this kind of work, I wonder? I'm guessing the best way to get your foot in the door is to be in academia, and those days are long passed for me.

Fortran story time:

As an undergrad, I had a good friend who was doing his PhD in Atmospheric Physics. It turns out, most of that field works in Fortran '88. This is not a very useful language, seeing as it uses GOTO statements to function as a loop. Fortunately, it does have comments. My friend managed to sweet-talk an older PI into giving him the old code for use in nuclear blast atmospherics (Exp: say you nuked all of France, what happens to Greenland's ice). At about 3 am before a project was due in the morning, he was pulling through the spaghetti that was the code, tired, jittery, and over-caffeinated. In this mess of logic diagrams he had to draw out by hand, he finally got to somewhere he thought was going to really cement all the code together for him. He follows a GOTO statement, and there was only a set of another GOTO statements. This went on for about 30 (my recollection of his words) GOTO statements, all 'nested'. Eventually, he gets to one that only has a comment line: 'HAHA MADE YOU LOOK'.

His laptop was defenestrated and he had to buy a new one with me about a week later.

I think the issue is more one of funding than of a lack of demand - I suspect there's not that many grants that let you hire a programmer for this kind of thing.

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