[martinky24]

- They pay like shit (compared to "sexy employers")

- Headquartered in Champaign, Illinois (not a bad town, but not sexy)

- As "cool" as their software is, not a lot of people use it. Python is eating their lunch, ESPECIALLY outside of academia. Although, they're losing ground in academia as well

- Stephen Wolfram isn't a charismatic leader who is fun to work for. There's no shortage of stories of him short circuiting in meetings and treating employees disrespectfully.

- They're not doing quite as much cutting edge stuff (that matters, at least) these days. Their AI/ML suite isn't that interesting, numpy/scipy does a lot of numerical stuff better, Matlab does a lot of stuff (like digital signal processing, for example) better. And Python, being free and open source, is a better prototyping language for most stuff. Symbolic computing is probably the one place it is actually a leader in... but for so many applications in the real world (engineering, r&d, real-time algorithms, etc) symbolic computing simply isn't needed.

As you hint at, they can attract some talent because there are opportunities to work on some niche stuff that's hard to work on elsewhere. But that's a minority of roles at the company.

Source: Used to work there.

[bmitc]

I think Mathematica is cool, but it is my understanding that Maple is actually superior to Mathematica in symbolic calculations.

[dachworker]

Thanks for the insight. I used to be a mathematician and looked a bit into working as a numerical mathematician on numerical or optimization software. What I noticed is that salaries do tend to be significantly lower than FAANG. Maybe that's because it is a niche and there aren't lots of employers around doing that sort of work.

[sokoloff]

How does the market for numeric optimization software divided by the number of engineers required to create and maintain it compare to the market for "nearly any physical good, cloud computing, eyeballs-for-ads, watching videos, connecting with other humans, high quality computers and mobile devices, maps, email, and search" divided by the [larger] number of engineers required to create and maintain it?

Sales / potential gross profit per FAANG employee is high.

[namirez]

I believe the main reason is that the skillset in this domain has a small overlap with what is needed at FAANG. This is done mostly in academia and as such the salaries are in line with the salaries at universities.

[looofooo0]

I know some mathematician working for big chemical company which has a huge internal Fortran Software stack for numerical optimization.

[Suppafly]

>- They pay like shit (compared to "sexy employers")

How do they pay compared to other midwestern employers?

[martinky24]

Relatively reasonably, for Champaign cost of living. But "local midwestern employer salary" isn't sexy.

[Suppafly]

>But "local midwestern employer salary" isn't sexy.

True, but it's always funny when people compare midwestern salaries to FAANG companies, as if the cost of living is like 10x less in the midwest. I don't know the specifics of what wolfram pays, but my gut feeling has always been that it's likely pretty good. A lot of the other random math and tech adjacent companies in the area started by ex-wolfram employees and UIUC grads seem to be doing pretty well.

[martinky24]

Yeah, I don't disagree. But again, the original metric was "sexy". But you're definitely better off getting a remote big-tech adjacent job than working at Wolfram Research, if you've got those chops.