Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

Re:Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search by TylerE on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @01:14PM (#7430198)

The thing is, that 0.1% would probably be better off just looking for a Math PhD. I suspect it is much easier to teach a mathematician C (Or Python/Haskell/OCaml/Java) than a programmer real math.

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Re:Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search by samatman on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @01:40PM (#7430389)

Math guy here, spent the last year writing high-performance ODE integrators that run on graphics cards. No formal background in CS at all. Hiring maths people to write performative algorithms is more common than not.

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Re:Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search by smm2000 on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @02:42PM (#7430795)

The problem is that Math PhDs tend to be arrogant and think that programming is for monkeys and they are above that. Code that they produce tends to be sub-par and under-tested (because they are above writing unit-tests).

Source: worked with multiple Math PhDs. Have a few friends who are Math PhD working on some esoteric problems that I could not understand.

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Re:Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search by cmbaus on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @02:59PM (#7430890)

I think you are drawing conclusions from a small sample size. I've had the exact opposite experience.

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Re:Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search by taybin on Thursday March 20, 2014 @10:53AM (#7435860)

They can do the algorithms, but they don't engineer, imho.

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