Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

You can find some pretty good responses on reddit.com/r/math. This gets asked quite often there.

The short story is: software development. Sure, there are more quantitative jobs like data science and ML and other mysterious math/scientist jobs that are quite hard to find and secure, but software development of any kind is the quickest way to a job. You'll need to convince people you're not a pie in the sky thinker, and so I'd recommend building up some side projects. Functional programming languages will probably suit you better, and those jobs can sometimes be more technical. Also, universities and research institutions, at least in the U.S., are hiring more and more software developers.

Regarding trading and blockchain, having some principles is fine, but you also need to eat. There's nothing wrong with taking a job for a couple of years to get your feet into industry and then moving on from there.

You’re right about software being a good option, but I will caution that it can feel like too much of a change for someone coming from math because the job interviews sometimes assume that you know the CS undergraduate curriculum. The other side of the coin is that being good at advanced math isn’t an advantage in something like web development, except insofar as it has trained you to be hypersensitive to potential errors (bugs) in the code.

As someone who made the move to software from math many years ago, it feels like it was a good short-term decision, but I don’t know if I can make a life-long career of it. Sometimes I wish I’d chosen something that played to my strengths more.

(Replying to bmitc too:)

Thanks! Indeed, software development seems like one of the most probable course (my bachelor was in CS, so that's not too far either) but I'd be worried to end up too deep in software development, with no "input" from what I learned studying maths. Ideally, I'd still put this background to good use.

BadCookie: isn't it possible to choose that as a short-term solution, and then slowly navigate to something closer to your strengths?

Sure, but HR departments and recruiters can be (it seems to me) irrationally rigid about job titles. But you can get around that by moving between teams within the same company, or so I’ve heard.

I’ve mostly enjoyed my career and can’t complain about the money, so take my half-hearted regrets with a grain of salt. I’d probably be questioning my career choices no matter what path I had taken! And with your CS degree, you can probably avoid some of the imposter syndrome that I have experienced.

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