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Comment by lutorm | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really looking for a job currently, but I'm interested in who would find someone with my skill set useful: Ph.D. in astrophysics, 15yr research experience, lots of coding in C++ and Python (mostly numerical, Monte Carlo, parallel computation, radiation transfer stuff). In general a pretty all-round kind of guy.

If an opportunity came along, I would be interested in something where I could use my knowledge of physics and coding for something more "applied" and immediately useful to humanity than astrophysics. Ring any bells?

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We've started a company to make an energy storage system using compressed air that's 10x cheaper and 10x longer lasting than traditional batteries, while being as efficient.

We don't need someone with the skillset immediately, but we would have. Have you considered greentech?

Yeah, that's one of the things I would be most interested in working with.

Sounds like a finance quant to me... except the "immediately useful to humanity" part, maybe ;)

Nope. I would hate my life, that's more like "actively harmful to humanity", in my mind...

How about SpaceX? We have a lots of openings for engineers, you might be interested in the software engineering position: https://tbe.taleo.net/NA3/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=SP...

That sounds fun. Maybe once I get my green card I'll get in touch with you guys.

This is slightly off topic, but I am an undergraduate student learning some of the subjects you mentioned in the parenthesis, and the curriculum/resources at my school are inadequate. Would you be open to a few questions? Please shoot me an email at loganfrederick@gmail.com!

That's one hell of a resume.

Lol. :)

Actually, I generally feel inferior in the coding discussions here, since I have very little experience with web/networking type stuff and that seems to be what's wanted/used.

I'm sorry I pretty much stopped working with employees and I'm half the world away but with that sort of background you'd almost want to create a thing around you that fits your skill-set.

Physics simulation is a world of its own, and as more and more of this software finds its way on to clusters you can't really avoid the networking portion of writing code (unless abstracted away in MPI or so, but then it still helps to know what's going on under the hood).

With what you already know it shouldn't be too hard to pick up the web bits & pieces but frankly I think your skills are more valuable to the right party than web skills are.

Thanks, it's nice to know that someone thinks it's useful! I'm just wondering who the right party is... ;-)

I wonder how much of what you know would be applicable to the lowest levels of computational biology, protein folding, that sort of problem. The problems are obviously different but have a lot in common with the kind of problems you'd run in to in astrophysics.

It's all forces and equilibria at that level.

Less so in the genetics department, that's much more string processing and image processing oriented.

I've thought about this, but if you set out to sell software to researchers it's very hard to find customers. Anyone working in this field already has some workable software, and your software would have to be an awful lot better in order to persuade them to switch... and the best-existing codes probably represent many man-years of work.

I've thought about starting a company in my own particular subfield (first-principles simulations on the atomic level) but have never quite got to the point where I come up with enough imaginary customers to make the effort worthwhile. And that's in my own field, which I already understand... catching up with computational biology from an astrophysics background would take a lot longer.

How about hiring yourself out to a company already active in that field ? At a discount initially, but in the longer term probably more lucrative.

Could do eventually, but happy within the ivory tower for now. Would only be tempted out by the big face money.

Somehow, if I'm going to write scientific software like I'm doing now, I think I prefer the academic freedom over (potentially) making more money. The reason for me to leave would be the "useful to humanity" angle.

My dad started his own company that does physics simulations. Most of his customers are labs and universities. I don't think he's hiring (he's the only employee), but if you shoot him an email, he might be able to give you some advice.

His name is Jon. Email: larsen@casinc.com

It sounds like Google might like to have you on board. Have you considered applying with them?

Actually, I did, but the H1B quota thwarted that... When the next quota period started it was 2009 and they weren't hiring, so I ended up staying in academia and moving to Boston. (I just married an American, so the whole visa deal should soon be over.)

The web stuff gets all the press, but there are other companies like Palantir that may be more suited for your skills and background:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/25/palantir-the-next-billion-d...

http://www.palantir.com/

Investment banks also like physicists and computer scientists for their quant trading work.

http://www.wilmott.com/

anybody who has lots of data and would like to analyze it would find you extremely valuable. You just pick a domain that interests you.

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