career advice

joseywhales

Career advise.
I would not see myself as a computer science guy but I am I guess a young developer.I come from a physics and maths backround with some physics simulation work but nothing too intensive.And a masters that involved some parallel programming.

So currently I work developing financial applications and while sometimes this can be interesting I always fear that my next bit of work could be incredibly boring.

My problem is I don't like making apps and shiney graphs or the presentation of information, I'm very terse minded and a lot of what I produce is unreadable at first glance but thats down to bad coding practise I guess. Anyway what I am interested in is process optimisation. I like vectors and algebra and processing information as quickly and efficiently as possible and I absolutely hate getting bogged down in hours and days of tedious work building UI's or writing quieries. I hate the client end.

So with this in mind, I need advise, the computer science and software engineering world is so massive and varied, I don't know which direction to point my sail in. I had thought about a one year msc in software engineering once I have a couple more years development under my belt, so that I can learn the more practical organisational elements to consrtucting proper software. Dream job though, would be writing the code for SCALAPACK or CUDA libraries or something, I don't know how to get involved in these things and I'm not good enough to make a contribution yet. But I hope you see where I'm going with this, I don't want to write UI's or apps, I'll get very depressed. Basically I have this strange outlook that I don't care about the product but only enjoy the process of making it and what I learned doing it. So how do I get involved and earn enough money to eat?

Collumbo

Dude, you're obviously not lacking in intelligence and have way more ability than a lot of programmers I've come across, but we're all doing the stuff you hate. Sounds to me like you should be working with games physics engines or whatnot... Have you tried looking at any of that stuff? Shouldn't be hard to figure out who does this in Dublin... and the fact that they find it hard to find fellas like you.

It's true alright that not having a good grasp of "constructing proper software" as you put it can hold you back. That said, a few decent books and getting your teeth stuck into open-source projects might be another option if you don't want to go back to college again...
Or have you looked at this? http://www.scss.tcd.ie/postgraduate/msciet/

Again... maybe you don't have any interest in physics engines so all of the above is useless to ya

Unfortunately you'd hate the jobs that are on offer in my place at the moment..

Edit: back to your dream job... i have no idea where in Ireland they have jobs of this nature so sorry to be of no help there.

amen

I like vectors and algebra and processing information as quickly and efficiently as possible and I absolutely hate getting bogged down in hours and days of tedious work building UI's or writing quieries

contradiction here between the you wanting work as efficiently /quickly as possible and writing queries.

Writing quick, efficient queries is a hard job involving a lot of thinking and understand as to how the data is accessed and how it can be improved.

Have you looked at code reuse, write once use many times, writing objects etc?

NeverSayDie

Nothing wrong with that OP, I reckon most of us have personal preferences in terms of different areas of development we like or don't. E.g. personally I do have a strong interest in HCI and development involving UI work, but embedded development for instance, is of very little interest to me, and not something I'd be keen to work at given a choice.

As you point out, there's a wide range of roles out there, and a lot of them will involve the kind of low-level backend stuff you appear to be looking for. Embedded development would definitely be an option there I think, it should suit what you're looking for, and there's a reasonable amount of it done in Ireland from what I gather. Some of the more technical aspects of game development might also appeal, though that's fairly hard to break into, and beyond Havok I'm not aware of many folks in Ireland doing that kind of work. Scientific development might be another option - research joints in universities recruit developers from time to time to help get their software going, and that can be pretty low-level and maths heavy, far as I gather anyway.

Another option I'd definitely consider in the meantime would be open source project work, you should be able to find the kind of development you want. A quick check around SourceForge or CodePlex turns up a variety of projects involving CUDA work for instance - like this one, to pluck a completely random example; http://sourceforge.net/projects/niftyrec/

joseywhales

amen wrote: »

contradiction here between the you wanting work as efficiently /quickly as possible and writing queries.

Writing quick, efficient queries is a hard job involving a lot of thinking and understand as to how the data is accessed and how it can be improved.

Have you looked at code reuse, write once use many times, writing objects etc?

Hey, I agree completely but what I'm saying is that I love low-level programming and while writing efficient optimised queries can be difficult and interesting I would prefer to re-invent the wheel if needs be. I don't enjoy these unexplained layers of abstraction. However I still have mountains to learn, I just don't want to follow the wrong direction.

krd

You should look to the US or maybe even Germany. Maybe even the UK.

Ireland is a very small country. There's not much going on and it's hard to get into some of the more interesting stuff. There's much less than there used to be.

Could someone correct me if I'm wrong. Most of the "development" business in Ireland these days is database jockeying.

conor.hogan.2

Database design or SQL maybe?

Good thing is you seem to be into what the majority of people hate doing.

amen

Ireland is a very small country. There's not much going on and it's hard to get into some of the more interesting stuff. There's much less than there used to be

IBM have an international computing group here. Normally master/phd required though. What about Cisco, HP, Havok etc ?

krd

amen wrote: »

IBM have an international computing group here. Normally master/phd required though. What about Cisco, HP, Havok etc ?

I don't know how large that IBM group is here but most of what IBM do in Ireland is international tech support and database jockeys on DB2. And if you're nostalgic for Win 3.1 applications take a look at their Lotus Notes. DB2's hot and sexy character driven UIs are trip straight back to the 70s.

HP is pretty much the same as IBM. I don't really know how much "research" they do - these organisations love bureaucracy. Lots of filling out forms I'd imagine.

I was talking to someone from Havok a few weeks back. He's a bollox. I was talking to him about what he does - from what I could make out, someone gives him some data and then he puts it in a template in C++ and that's his job. No development just following a process.

Cisco don't write their own code. They're more of a marketing exercise. I would raise an eyebrow at anyone who tells you differently. The manufactures who supply Cisco do write their own - then Cisco slap their labels on the gear and they're done.

I won't name names - but some of the biggies go out of their way to hire stupid people. The HRs think they have better people skills. In fact all the big companies like to hire morons and then buy all their tricky stuff in from small developers.

conor.hogan.2

They are certain people - you cant just seep off whole companies based off that.

krd

Conor, don't sulk with me. I could go back over ten years ago and there were lots of very interesting little companies doing stuff. Some big ones.

I have had the pleasure of supporting some of the developers of some companies I will not name. And it was the of the variety "open the command line", "how do I do that?". "Let's use telnet", "What?". Planet of the muppets. And you see, once, you'd pass it of as a fluke - it happening again and again - and your colleagues having the same experiences with these people and you begin to see a pattern.