Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

Academic trends are ruled by money. In theoretical physics, computer simulations is where the money is. For the students, that means they are doing computer science related work, frequently the physics part is lacking. The route to leaving physics and using the data science capabilities is then a straightforward one.

Nothing, as they don't seem to be hiring physicists.

When I still pursued my PhD in physics, I worked on all-optical amplifiers with phase noise reduction for fiber communication.

Now I develop software for a medium-sized ISP and IT outsourcing company.

I'm not a physicist but studied physics before jumping to programming.

A surprising amount of people whom I studied with ended up as programmers themselves, after finishing the physics degree.

When I got my PhD (1999) the American Physical Society said that you had a 2% chance of getting a permanent job in the field with a PhD. At that point you are not being judged on your merits but on your connections, ability to navigate politics, etc. (The job is way too valuable compared to the value you can give to it.)

I saw a postdoc who is now rather well known struggling with anxiety over his career even though he had written half a book and done a lot of great work. When we were both at Cornell I'd come to the conclusion that many papers involving "power law" distributions were bogus because nobody knew how to test for them with any rigor. It was years later, after he had tenure, that he published something about it in a statistics journal.

Seeing that made me run for the exit after my first year as a postdoc.

I am about to defend my thesis in physics and will probably start a data science job afterwards (have had a few second round interviews, waiting for offers/rejections). Note that my thesis work did not contain big data or machine learning, but I have completed a couple of outside projects. I am in the US and in a top tier university/program.

My perspective is that there is just not many academic positions available. I realized I could do a couple of post docs for a few years and hope that something opens up, or not delay the most probable outcome and start an industry career sooner rather than later.

(PhD, 1996 in general relativity)

Embedded graphics drivers for real-time systems.

I keep the physics part of my brain alive by developing physics based Unity assets (nbodyphysics.com) and supporting a package for GR on github (grtensor).

I still buy WAY too many physics books. Current aspiration is to work through "Modern Classical Physics" Thorne/Blandford.

I have a degree in physics and work as a software dev (c++). No one cares for physics in the industry, but it's indirectly taken as a sign that people aren't morons. I never used anything I learned at university at work. About half of my colleagues have physics or Math degrees, other half EE or CS.

I worked in numrel before and was even offered a tenure track job focused on teaching. I didn't want to work 70 hour weeks though. Now I focus on my family and data pipelines seem like a nice hobby.

I did my undergraduate in Aerospace Engineering and Astrophysics, then graduate work in Space Systems Engineering and regular Systems Engineering. I also did plasma physics research at Princeton.

Now I'm doing aerospace vehicle modeling and simulation in MATLAB and C++ and primarily work with other physicists. This is by far the most enjoyable work I've done and the pay is excellent - my salary is 3-4x the average household income for the city I live in.

(PhD, 2008 in Complex Systems)

While my PhD did start out as supposedly being on Spin Glasses it quickly diverged to Complex Networks and what people would now call Data Science. Since then, I've worked on Social Science, Epidemiology, Human Behavior, etc... For the last year or so, I've been doing Data Science and Finance in one of the Big Banks.

(5th year PhD student)

Working on my thesis analysis (collider based HEP), squeezing in time for OSS development and prepping for a jump to software dev.

I love physics, but academia is in a rough place right now. Almost everyone I know pursuing the academic career path has nightmare stories.

Money aside, there is a sort of more systematic reason we see physics MS/PhDs bailing to industry.

Though theory groups in general tend to use computational simulations as a tool to complete calculations, groups that develop novel computational methods and techniques tend to be headed by younger, more junior professors. These groups are typically well-funded and do very exciting (trendy? cutting edge?) work with distributed computation, machine learning, neural networks, etc, so they tend to pull quite a few students.

While these computational groups tend to bring in funding and are well-staffed by excited grad students, the junior professors leading them tend to be marginalized by the more traditional, seniority-focused establishment. Which is to say, a new PhD might have a lot of trouble landing a prestigious postdoc because a) their adviser might have been too young to have high name recognition outside their field and b) departments might place limits the amount of staff for these more junior professors/young groups doing exciting computational work. This is, of course, on top of the overall scarcity of jobs in academia.

But there's no such job scarcity in industry-- especially not for stats-smart programmers with years of experience a) wrangling data in python, b) writing fortran that runs on distributed clusters, or c) designing algorithms to solve /approximate hilariously expensive problems. Advisers know this and point some of their students who might thrive more in industry than academia towards that route.

(Anecdote: And of course, as a physicist who builds models/simulations in industry, I can speak a personally a little re: thriving. If you're someone in love with solving disparate problems, you're unlikely to find that in academia. Some of us learn in graduate school that we can't spend our whole lives-- or in my case, more than a few months-- solving one problem. Academia just... didn't seem like something that would be worth fighting for.)

I assume that this will gradually change as there's turnover within physics departments and we get more computational-first professors with seniority (or even in leadership). There are a few departments with better-known professors you can see it happening now. Universities are spinning up incubators and institutes for computational research. Physics departments are just slower to adapt to new developments, and the hierarchy of theorists can have more to do with seniority and internal politics than it does with technology.

PhD 2008, now a data "science" generalist

I am a physicist working as a physicist! My field of experimental particle physics, at least, is very hacker-ey: we develop instrumentation hardware, low-level data acquisition software, database and web apps for experiment operations and monitoring, and the like, beyond the data analysis. Of course, there are many industry opportunities for people with this kind of experience. In addition to the issues pointed out in other comments (small number of academic positions, salary differences), I think there are two cultural factors that are helping people transition out of academia: an increasing awareness on the part of advisors and institutions that students need more broadly marketable experience, and a corresponding decrease in the stigma of leaving academia. As one example, I routinely see notices distributed for Insight data science programs within our community.

I got my masters, then pursued a PhD for 6 months after which an opening in computer graphics came up in the industry. I abandoned my PHd and started a career as software engineer.

The reason was I sucked in physics, did not find my PhD position motivating and loved computer graphics.

13 years later I'm a valued technical contributor in a team in an ISV creating a valuable global software packages in the CAD field.

Middle class income, could probably make lot more in US with my skillset but family situation really is not awesome for expatriation.

I'm doing OK.

With physics skillset you can pretty much make your career what you want it to be. You just need a proactive attitude to read on other fields. You need to understand the other guys mindset so you understand the overall game going on. It's usually not nefarious (although it can be), but most of the time the rules that are used are not the vocalized ones. In this empirical physics is a wonderfull philosophical background. Organizations have certain dynamic rules which half of the people are not aware of. You don't need to "play the game", but you need to understand the rules so that when the wind blows into the direction you want to go into you can grab the opportunity.

I had a pretty good idea where I wanted to be 13 years ago (R&D in a position that values quality over quantity and speed with a great team) and that's pretty much where I am now.

You need to know where you want to go, and go there. No one will guide your path. Physicists are an outlier but that math and mindset is really an asset. Just don't get stuck in fixing bugs in some legacy monstrosity, that is absolutely soul crushing. But such a position can function as a stepping stone if you are operating in the industry you want to work in.

I posted this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19500510 (by some former colleagues) just a few min before seeing your question

(PhD 2010 in Nuclear Physics) I stayed in Academia, right now I'm trying to survive the first year as an Assistant Professor. Teaching is a lot more fun than I thought it would be. My research is two fold: One half of my research is focused on precision measurements of the proton form factors (proton radius puzzle, form factor ratio puzzle), the other half on streaming readout for next-gen experiments.

I am currently working o my cryptocurency blog: https://cryptostaunch.com/

Physicist, working as a physicist (PhD 2015). Precision tests of gravity, primarily. We test the equivalence principle, Newton's inverse square law, hunt for exotic forms of dark matter, and build/invent cutting-edge sensors for LIGO.

I have begun looking about at jobs outside of academia in order to decide whether to stay or go. Data science is one of the easiest transitions a physicist with data-analysis can make, which I think explains the prevalence of physicists in that role. We have the training in both the techniques and a sober assessment of uncertainties, which makes us desirable.

So far, in my search for outside employment, I haven't found anything that draws me as much as my present work, but if you're in the Seattle area and looking for an experimental physicist with a broad range of experience, please get in touch.

I'll leave this here, since many comments are about the transition from physics to data science.

"For now, however, in hard-core physical science at least, there is little evidence of any major BD-driven breakthroughs, at least not in fields where insight and understanding rather than zerosales resistance is the prime target: physics and chemistry do not succumb readily to the seduction of BD/ML/AI. It is extremely rare for specialists in these domains to simply go out and collect vast quantities of data, bereft of any guiding theory as to why it should be done. There are some exceptions, perhaps the most intriguing of which is astronomy, where sky scanning telescopes scrape up vast quantities of data for which machine learning has proved to be a powerful way of both processing it and suggesting interpretations of recorded measurements. In subjects where the level of theoretical understanding is deep, it is deemed aberrant to ignore it all and resort to collecting data in a blind manner. Yet, this is precisely what is advocated in the less theoretically grounded disciplines of biology and medicine, let alone social sciences and economics. The oft-repeated mantra of the life sciences, as the pursuit of ‘hypothesis driven research’, has been cast aside in favour of large data collection activities [7]. And, if the best minds are employed in large corporations to work out how to persuade people to click on online advertisements instead of cracking hard-core science problems, not much can be expected to change in the years to come. An even more delicate story goes for social sciences and certainly for business, where the burgeoning growth of BD, more often than not fuelled by bombastic claims, is a compelling fact, with job offers towering over the job market to anastonishing extent. But, as we hope we have made clear in this essay, BD is by no means the panacea its extreme aficionados want to portray to us and, most importantly, to funding agencies. It is neither Archimedes’ fulcrum, nor the end of insight."

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.201...

(HEP Phd, finishing)

I'll also be joining the data science world.

There's some debate about whether it's the best or worse time ever to be in particle physics. Either way I see a field that is overstaffed. Add to that the fact that CERN accelerators are shut down for two years and we're in the middle of the european strategy review.

Seems like a good moment to take some time out

I'm not a physicist, but a physics drop-out. However, I am still in touch with many of the people I studied with. Only a few stayed in physics in the end.

One thing I noticed is that because physics has multiple decades more experience with dealing with big data compared to just about every other scientific field, a lot of physicists who jump ship tend to end up in a position where they can apply that expertise.

I worked as a programmer for a molecular neurobiology research group for two years. Biology is going through a kind of Cambrian explosion of new data (especially when it comes to anything that involves genetics). So it's probably not surprising that a number of people at work told me that it is extremely common to see physicists switch to biology because that's where all the exciting new research is happening, with new theories and discoveries, and lots of people who are very happy to steal whatever the physicists have already figured out about how to process and interpret mountains of data.

Deep learning consulting ("I teach people to teach machines").

Finished my PhD in quantum optics in 2014, but immediately moved to data science.

Why not physics? Full version: http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to-data-sci.html

tl:dr: I wanted a fast-pasted field with more freedom. Physics is now stale (no fundamental changes in the last decades, compared to each year in deep learning; cf. physics in 1900-1920), and academia offers a rigid framework of grants and feudal dependence. In data science, as a freelancer/consultant, I get much more freedom. Even in companies, one is able to migrate in a matter of weeks, not years.

Money was a nice perk, not anywhere near to the main motivation.

I'm a physicist, with a PhD in physics. I worked for a while as a post-doc in Italy and recently I quit University, working now in the private sector as a Data Scientist.

I'm happy with the change, my life is more relaxed now. I've time for my family, for me. I've also better and stable earnings.