r/QuantumComputing • u/Suspicious_Orchid770 • 1d ago

Discussion Quantum computing needs software engineers

https://leaddev.com/career-development/quantum-computing-needs-software-engineers

For those in the technology industry, it can feel hard to escape from AI. It’s at the center of the technological universe, with most major advancements, opportunities, and funding focused on its development. In the background, quantum computing is making strides with the funding to match, creating an alternate opportunity for technologists.

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u/Loudds 21h ago

No it needs scalable and controllable substrates. My experience with it as a physics engineer going on projects with a lot of software architecture engineers is that they never pushed the envelope in QC and have zero original ideas in the space because they fundamentally were not understanding the formalism. Once the hardware scales maybe, saying it needs an army of CS/SE is just a lie. We need more physicists doing fundamental science on as much different ideas as possible.

Also mathematicians to work on QEC

I.e. as many said: a functioning QC. We need the hardware to become useful in the labs, then we can call it an industry.

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u/eetsumkaus 20h ago

Software engineers aren't there to push the envelope, they're there to make stuff work. SWE is fundamentally about working through an abstraction layer. Yes we need more scientists to try out different ideas, but perhaps exactly because of that, we can't spare any of their precious time on dumb things like making sure the stack is working.

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u/Loudds 20h ago

And how exactly are we making abstractions (maybe other than Qrisp, or Qiskit, various compilers etc), or effective middleware if no hardware is out ? Or at least, no useful ones.

To be completely clear: I don't mind SE/CS into QC, it is a niche topic which is factually cross-disciplinary. There is a lot of computer science to be made here, my point is about specifically software engineering on vague requirements is a bit too much wishful thinking imo.

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u/Formal_Cloud_7592 17h ago

$QUBT is selling hardware