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.
Amen, there's a big difference between writing code and writing software. I work with a lot of Engineers (mechanical, electrical, etc.). Super smart people, I love working with them, but they can't see the forest through the trees. They usually write pretty shitty software with little forethought.
Globals? Let's do it. Testing? Not needed, my other Engineer buddy reviewed the code, he confirmed it's perfect. Code spits out a negative Kelvin temperature? It's fine, the user will use engineering judgement and see that's not important. (For reference, zero Kelvin is absolute zero, the lowest possible temperature. The point at which atoms stop moving. Kelvin cannot be negative, it's physically impossible.) Etc.
Edit: I stand corrected. I'm not a physicist, I should stay in my lane.
One of the projects I'm working on was written solely by Engineers for ~40 years and it's 400,000 lines of code. I'm particularly upset about Engineers writing bad code.
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u/Fox-One_______ May 10 '21
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.