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pan comments on Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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The problem with many of the government labs is that they want post docs and not employees, and I'd rather just skip that and start as an actual employee somewhere.
In addition many of the places I've applied (many of which you listed) have very long application processes (months) which means I'm in the dark as to whether I'll get zero offers or an offer from every place which I applied. Therefore I'd like to be cautious and cultivate as many options as possible.
Lastly, I tend to get into situations like these (ones with big decisions and many unclear options) and end up realizing in retrospect that there were more interesting opportunities available than the one I took, but that I panicked and didn't properly explore the options. So I'm trying to make a serious effort of looking for and apply to 'out of the box' employment options.
Have you thought about big bucks in Si-valley or finance? I kind of envy physicists because I feel like they have the kind of math skills that lets them figure out anything from first principles.
I'd be happy to work in Silicon valley or finance, and I've applied to the big ones like Google and Microsoft but it's kind of tough to find companies to apply to. Another commenter recommended the HN monthly hiring post, which is a good resource but very focused on programming.
Right...
That's not quite what it feels like from the inside either. It's more like, "You're looking at this enormous noodle soup! Well, let's see what we can say with certainty, and let's poke around for useful approximations. If that doesn't work, I got nuffin'."
Physicists tend to have very good modeling chops. A fellow in the early 1900s (Ising) was trying to come up with a model for ferromagnetism and came up with Markov random fields, basically. That is amazing to me.
Meanwhile, in psychometrics: "I know, let's model intelligence by one number!"
edit: There is some controversy about how much of this was Ising vs Ising's advisor. This does not affect my point about physicists, though.
Right, I kind of swept that under the rug as part of approximations - as in, 'try making a seemingly overly-simple model of the individual components and see if the relevant behavior emerges'. Could have been clearer on that.