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by khadgar25 2079 days ago
I have a PhD but I work in industry. We have people from national labs usually because of compensation. It's not high six figures but it is pretty competitive especially for the area I live in. I worked in finance for a few years in New York and although the pay was better, living in Manhattan has a way to humble you :)

To be honest, I feel like I really lucked into this job and don't really know many places that employ people like me for solving PDEs in industry but you could definitely try something like quant researcher/developer which will alleviate some of the compensation woes from university and still have aspects of mathematical code to some extent.

1 comments

Thanks. It does feel the same here. The jobs are quite niche and the pay not so great (comparatively to the demands of the job), and often a Ph.d is required.
I’ve always wondered if jobs like this exist, but I’ve never actually seen a job posting for one. As a developer with a math degree, these kinds of jobs have always been something of a dream for me. Any tips on where to look?
For simulation type jobs where you are solving PDEs for some kind of nontrivial domain: * universities sometimes have scientific programmers * national labs in your country will definitely have some people doing such work * big names in industry, engineering and manufacturing e.g. in the past petroleum exploration companies used to hire quite a few people * boutique consulting firms that you never heard of (you need to do a lot of research in your area to find them) * Mathworks and similar names that develop engineering software

For programming jobs including some math in general, well I'm jumping on the hype train that is ML/DL because the jobs are more numerous and pay better even when factoring in the currently hype.