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Comment by goblgobl | Hacker News Reader

Any advice for a 24yr old trying to work in high performance computing?

Decided about a year ago to switch careers, and I've been getting familiar w/ a few low level languages (C, C++, Java), and working my way through a few books like SICP, Cormen's and Skiena's algorithms books, Code Complete, etc.

The OP seems to have landed an internship already, whereas I have been failing miserably at this. I've been cold emailing companies, applying for internships, etc. I've written a few basic beginner type programs, nothing large scale or real world yet.

I have a ways to go, but it sure would be nice to have some sort of mentoring and/or get involved with real projects of some kind. I'm doing great self-teaching, but there's obviously value in working with more experienced developers. I know having code to show is important (github, opensource), but what else should I be doing to land that first software job?

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Well if my experience is of any use... Keep at it! I didn't graduate from a top tier college or have been creating game engines since 9 years old, so I had to start at the ground floor like most people. It was extremely difficult at the beginning. From what I noticed, cold emailing rarely works. I had the most feedback/interviews/responses from either recruiters, networking and actually moving to tech hubs like Silicon Valley.

From the code perspective, a lot of companies noticed my open source contributions. Granted they were mostly minor utility code, there's always that little spark of joy from their voices whenever we go over that topic.

So go join an open source project! I know it's reiterated over and over again, but a good project can act as proxy real-world experience in helping you discover what it takes to write production quality code.

I guess if there was a single tip I could give, just be highly visible in committed code, web presence (as a programmer, not as a party animal) in websites and social networks, and face-to-face networking. That would raise your chances of being noticed.

HPC is a rather specific subset of the programming world. My experience is that a lot of pure HPC code is researchy/research lab driven.

If you have an undergrad degree (of any type) already, you could look around for a MS program with an advisor who is doing HPC research. You have a shot at getting into a program which will probably require you to take or place out of undergrad coursework (SICP and CLR are probably going to make that workout just fine for you).

If you want to go all self-schooled, maybe you could pick up one of the new CUDA books and do some decent re-implementations of hard HPC stuff for that environment. Side projects like that would make me look at a resume twice if I had a need for a HPC hacker . . .

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