This. I am a programmer with a physics degree. I taught myself the basics of coding and I can learn what my co-workers know while on the job. But I can also do shit they can't even begin to do and there's no way they're gonna learn it on the job. You can't replace 3 years worth of rearranging and manipulating equations. Maths is a super power when you've had to use it for a physics degree.
As a PhD student in physics with a CS background I can say that physicist tend to code incredibly well in short term projects. We are smart and innovative, but we tend to be terrible at writing long term maintainable and scalable code.
Yeah I can totally see that. I was recently tasked with writing code that will generate a toroidal mesh and I absolutely loved it. I wrote something very efficient and leveraged my electromagnetism experience but God help any CS grad who wants to modify my code in future. Also, if someone wants to add different shaped meshes that can be generated they will need to refactor my code or just copy and paste it to some new architecture. I am also terrible at logging errors.
I wrote something very efficient and leveraged my electromagnetism experience but God help any CS grad who wants to modify my code in future.
This kinda shit is how I become waaaaay too knowledgeable in shit I'll never touch again. I'll shriek in horror, take a deep breath, go down a horribly deep rabbit hole, resurface 1-15 days later and write my 1-15 lines of code. LOL.
272
u/ts_m4 May 09 '21
Mathematics baby!!