| As someone who fits the description: 1. A non-negligible amount of physics research involves programming. Analyzing large amounts of data in ways that (hopefully) no one has ever considered before is not something you can easily do by hand anymore. 2. Physicists are taught to see the world as reductionists: complex systems are broken down into smaller, more understandable parts. Hell, most of physics is reducing things to take advantage of symmetries, or approximate interactions as harmonic oscillators (springs), or a small number of other very well understood/studied phenomena. The hard part is making sure your reductionist assumptions and approximations are correct. 3. High-end physics research positions at universities are very few and far between (and are very much a boys club of nepotism with regards to hiring), and even those don't offer the kind of compensation that you see for mid-level software developers in tech companies. 4. After you've learned how to read & interpret publications in physics research, most computer science papers seem tame in comparison. Incidentally, the reasons I described above are also why many physicists end up being hired by investment banks or hedge funds. Out of all the people from university I still keep in touch with, I think only one of them is doing actual research in physics. The rest are working in tech or at a bank/fund. |