myst1

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4 yıl öncediscuss

And five years of gluing APIs together that help get more people to click advertisements - you'd be surprised how much math you forget. Machine learning can be better for exercising math, but most company's do not want anyone doing anything new. Same goes for physical sciences in my experience. You basically get a PhD to do associates level work. Even if you know a better way, that comes after you get ten yrs experience and have authority over projects. See the first sentence of this post for a catch 22. Bleh.

4 yıl öncediscuss

Most company's right now want to automate all skilled labor away as quickly as possible. CEOs don't want innovation, they want a saleable product with the highest profit margin and the least risk. Removing people was always the goal.

I've worked at two jobs were in the first week I was told my goal was to automate myself so I could progress my career... Yup okay then...

4 yıl öncediscuss

One could argue that bad software engineering practices are rewarded by academia. If no one can follow your work you drive away competition so why write comments. If you regularly refactor your work no one can use your API but you. Not unit testing ensures that code is cryptic, and people will have a hard time refuting your claims due to errors. The list goes on and on.

4 yıl öncediscuss

Most of the reproducibility issues in chemistry happen in biochem in my experience(meanwhile it gets the most funding). That said, synthetic chemistry is also a problem area. Usually in synthetic chemistry it's not that the work can't be entirely reproduced, but rather that yields are fudged. That's mostly because PIs say "you can't graduate until this reaction yields 99%.". So after someone has written four papers, taught classes at minimum wage for 7 years, they fudge a 95% to a 99%. It's not okay, but neither is the way academia is structured. Super glad my discipline was elsewhere, but I saw colleagues suffer from this stuff...

4 yıl öncediscuss

Hard to get into, have to move to one of five places, usually requires security clearances (huge ordeal), extremely clean lifestyle, if your PI is evil expect zero protection, post doc can be considered entry level qualifications, can be asked to work 7 days a week. Ultimately, usually still pays less than entry level software positions offering full time remote work...

4 yıl öncediscuss

No there isn't good money in physics and chemistry or pure math. PhD chemists almost never make 6 figures even in high cost of living areas serving as a specialist. I made less as a senior scientist or a project manager in chemistry than I do as an entry level software engineer. I don't know how many physicists I've met who work minimum wage jobs, usually call centers, after their PhD/post doc (even finding a PhD is difficult, let alone completing one in 6 years).

FEM can offer money but you are competing against engineers who that's what they've done for years.

If you interviewed software engineers and data scientists right now I bet a third of them once were physical scientists/mathematicians who mostly regret their degrees or the fact they can't find survivable work using them.

4 yıl öncediscuss

A lot of the smarter people I know have been recruited into Europe. People say "the salaries are so much lower lol", but the reality is, you often have employment laws that remove terrible occurrences as possibilities that are commonplace in America, you have access to healthcare, being a home owner is actually possible and if you don't want that renting is better overall. European culture is usually way less cut throat, and managers typically know their stuff, rather then failing upwards to half a million dollar salary's where using the word "digital" and being a brute is the main requirement.

Salary isn't everything. European engineering is a pretty different culture.

The way the us tries to prevent this is by crippling their people with student debt.

4 yıl öncediscuss

Even if you have a PhD it sucks. Everyone without a PhD is trying to one up you, and everyone with one has invented ten other arbitrary things that ensure you are human trash on arrival.

Also, imagine all the people who failed out of masters or PhD programs who end up in management and are resentful. It's a surprisingly common thing.

4 yıl öncediscuss

In the us, a few years ago, my program offered a stipend of 22,000 usd per year. Provided I taught a few classes, graded homework, tests, etc. While doing research and taking my own classes.

That was very lucky, many programs do not offer stipends and require people to take out loans.

4 yıl öncediscuss

I've seen people get fired from a academia on several occasions... When they couldn't fire someone they beat them down so regularly and buried them so deep people left or had a mental breakdown.

4 yıl öncediscuss

Ignoring machine learning entirely... Chemists benefit from this. Being able to type in a moiety and the product you want saves a bunch of trouble...

4 yıl öncediscuss

They should probably pay them the going wage for software engineers too. I used to work in science, the salary's are often half of what entry level swe positions are, and require an PhDs/post docs...

People wonder why r&d in the us is in a slump... Well it's mostly because choosing a natural science for a profession is punishment compared to software.

4 yıl öncediscuss

Known reactions is also a very large space. Everyday dozens of papers get published enlisting many reactions on a good deal of different starting materials. Guess it depends on what you want out of it.

4 yıl öncediscuss

That's mostly true in the biological sciences (biochem included), less so in chemistry.

4 yıl öncediscuss

Majority of the problem here isn't a database problem ironically. It's a scraping, cleaning, and organizing problem. That said I would also be interested in helping.

4 yıl öncediscuss

Although this is a good idea. It is a monstrous task. A basic exercise in combinatorics would show that this is difficult. I can think of technologies capable of making this happen, but it could be expensive to complete. Sounds like a good project but could lead to some social/communal harm (it wasn't in the db so I invented it...). Would be a hell of a lot of fun to try to do though.