[jdiez17]

I agree with your description of web development work, I would personally find it very difficult to do that professionally because of the lack of rigor and blasé attitude to software quality.

However, web development is not the only way you can make money by programming computers. I encourage you to look into either scientific programming or embedded software development. Your peers would be much more competent in their respective areas than you would typically expect working in a webdev consultancy, and generally you will find a better work-life balance in these type of companies. They also don't expect you to have a GitHub profile full of weekend hacks, they are just looking for someone who knows their stuff and can work within a multidisciplinary team.

If you are in the UK feel free to send me an email (see my profile) and I can give you some tips for where to start looking for professional work in these areas.

Good luck!

[emsal]

I'm a current CS student who's had a couple of backend internships and am interested in doing stuff with scientific computing in the future (likely wanting to go into grad school for this).

In general, where can I find resources about the kinds of career starting points I can get into as someone with this kind of interest? It seems like the most popular kind of job with a bit more theoretical rigour than web dev is being a data scientist/machine learning engineer at a similar webdev sort of company.

[jdiez17]

Here's a list of broad fields within scientific computing that you can dig into:

* Numerical simulation: writing code to solve physical models (fluid dynamics, material stress, etc), optimizing them for a given goal

* High-performance computing: running those simulations or other compute-intensive task in a supercomputer (aka a bunch of computers networked together), using APIs like OpenMP

* Machine learning: training and using mathematical models to predict things about the world. Seems to be all the rage right now...

* Data visualization: how do we make sense of all of this data!?

To answer your question more directly, if you have a broad familiarity with some of the topics I listed above (and a natural curiosity and ability to learn, most importantly), you should be able to land a junior job and go from there. Think about the types of companies that use these things. E.g.: biomedical companies need lots of machine learning people, jet engine manufacturers use lots of numerical simulations.

[emsal]

Thanks so much! This cleared up a lot of things for me.

[itronitron]

read up on the faculty in your current school and if anything have done anything of interest to you then ask to discuss their field of research. college is the perfect time to explore the landscape and find out about the various sub-disciplines in a field like CS

[actsasbuffoon]

It’s true that slapping together a WordPress site doesn’t require much rigor, but that’s not what all web development is like. Building a site that can handle tens of millions of requests per day takes a lot of very rigorous work. Writing highly concurrent web services also requires a methodical mind.

Web development describes many different kinds of work. The work doesn’t get easier just because the end result is exposed via an HTTP endpoint.