Move Over, Coders - Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Coders and graduate computer scientists a different beast djf


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: January 16, 2017 at 12:50:53 PM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Move Over, Coders - Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Move Over, Coders—Physicists Will Soon Rule Silicon Valley
> By Cade Metz
> Jan 16 2017
> <https://www.wired.com/2017/01/move-coders-physicists-will-soon-rule-silicon-valley/>
>
> It’s a bad time to be a physicist.
>
> At least, that’s what Oscar Boykin says. He majored in physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and in 2002 he 
> finished a physics PhD at UCLA. But four years ago, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland discovered 
> the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle first predicted in the 1960s. As Boykin points out, everyone expected it. The 
> Higgs didn’t mess with the theoretical models of the universe. It didn’t change anything or give physcists anything 
> new to strive for. “Physicists are excited when there’s something wrong with physics, and we’re in a situation now 
> where there’s not a lot that’s wrong,” he says. “It’s a disheartening place for a physicist to be in.” Plus, the pay 
> isn’t too good.
>
> Boykin is no longer a physicist. He’s a Silicon Valley software engineer. And it’s a very good time to be one of 
> those.
>
> Boykin works at Stripe, a $9-billion startup that helps businesses accept payments online. He helps build and operate 
> software systems that collect data from across the company’s services, and he works to predict the future of these 
> services, including when, where, and how the fraudulent transactions will come. As a physicist, he’s ideally suited 
> to the job, which requires both extreme math and abstract thought. And yet, unlike a physicist, he’s working in a 
> field that now offers endless challenges and possibilities. Plus, the pay is great.
>
> If physics and software engineering were subatomic particles, Silicon Valley has turned into the place where the 
> fields collide. Boykin works with three other physicists at Stripe. In December, when General Electric acquired the 
> machine learning startup Wise.io, CEO Jeff Immelt boasted that he had just grabbed a company packed with physicists, 
> most notably UC Berkeley astrophysicist Joshua Bloom. The open source machine learning software H20, used by 70,000 
> data scientists across the globe, was built by Swiss physicist Arno Candel, who once worked at the SLAC National 
> Accelerator Laboratory. Vijay Narayanan, Microsoft’s head of data science, is an astrophysicist, and several other 
> physicists work under him.
>
> It’s not on purpose, exactly. “We didn’t go into the physics kindergarten and steal a basket of children,” says 
> Stripe president and co-founder John Collison. “It just happened.” And it’s happening across Silicon Valley. Because 
> structurally and technologically, the things that just about every internet company needs to do are more and more 
> suited to the skill set of a physicist.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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