Comment by ccppurcell
1 year ago
Hi I'm a mathematician with a background in graph theory and algorithms. I'm trying to find a job outside academia. Can you elaborate on the kind of work you were doing? Sounds like I could fruitfully apply my skills to something like that. Cheers!
Look into quantitative analyst roles at finance firms if you’re that smart.
There’s also a role called being an algorithms engineer in standard tech companies (typically for lower level work like networking, embedded systems, graphics, or embedded systems) but the lack of an engineering background may hamstring you there. Engineers working in crypto also use a fair bit of algorithms knowledge.
I do low level work at a top company, and you only use algorithms knowledge on the job a couple of times a year at best.
You can try to get a job at an investment bank, if you're okay with heavy slogging, i.e., in terms of hours, which I have heard is the case, although that could be wrong.
I heard from someone who was in that field, that the main qualification for such a job is analytical ability and mathematics knowledge, apart from programming skills, of course.
That was about 20 years ago. Not much translates to today's world. I was in the algorithms team working on a CMDB product. Great tech, terrible marketing.
These days it's very different, mostly large-ish distributed systems.
Thanks for replying anyway!