Originally posted by Rosen Dimitrov:
Thank you all guys for your advice!
Especially you Mark for encouraging me. It is nice to meet fellow physicists who have made it in the software field.
Which directon did you take Mark if you don't mind sharing it with us?
Happy to help. I generally have a brand of "tough love" in this forum. I really do think people, spurred on by our sensationalist media, are making it out to be worse then it really is.
I ended up staying in school another 2 years to get a masters degree in cryptography. Let me tell you, quantum physics seems easy after cryptography!
After getting my masters degree, I continued at my college, this time as research staff, working on developing the Curl language. The group turned into a startup company, but I choose not to join them. (It seemed to be the rigth decision.)
I was very briefly part of a dot com, for about 2 months. But they seemed incompetant, and they never paid me.
I joined a boutique software company here in Cambridge. They claimed to be a startup, but really they were just a small firm. It has a core engineering team and consulting practice bacsed on our proprietary technology. That was a good opportunity, because I got to experience both development and consulting.
I left that firm and joined my last one, which was a wireless software company. There I got a lot of experience growing a development team and a company. In addition to my technical skills, I was able to enhance my business skills.
I was able to learn a lot at these small places, especially my last comapny, because I am the type of person who will sieze opportunity. I saw many others who, simply because they were young, didn't get as much out of it, and could ahve gotten more out of a better structured place.
I quit my last job in November, in order to write a book on software engineering, based largely on what I saw at my last 2 companies, and from what I learned at seeing and hearing about other companies.
Overall, I think physics is a great background for software engineering. One thing that this hard to teach is analysis. CS programs are very bad at that; physics is very good at that. There are a lot of physicists who left for software.
I agree that biotech is a good field for you to try, because it requires a strong science background, and many physicists went to that field, too. Finance is also an option, because wall street has hired physicists for years to work as quants.
--Mark