I’m an engineer doing research and designing processes for identifying and separating materials, working for a company with a few hundred employees. I have a lot of free reign, being one of only a few engineers working on several projects and in one case basically the only one working on the project. I like it a lot. I’m easy to please, but I suspect many engineers have worse jobs. Doing research in a field with lots of relatively low-hanging fruit is nice work if you can get it.
I have an opportunity that is kind of like this only within my area of statistical machine learning. A large entertainment company is looking to hire a few developers / engineers to do data mining on various things, ranging from visual features of advertisements and web content to user click statistics. The goal would be to make their web entertainment options more profitable and more monetizable. At first, this sounded dull to me. But after thinking more about it, using mathematics in this manner could be somewhat fun. I like data mining and machine learning, and they are really looking for someone who knows real mathematics and can work autonomously to develop novel statistical approaches to their monetization tasks. The autonomy sounds kind of high in this job, even though it would all be focused on making more money. This sounds better to me than a financial analyst job (similar job description, but the working hours would be far worse) and it also sounds better than a job doing military type research, which is one of the other things I can do with machine learning.
I’m a little scared to jump ship into the entertainment industry, though. I’m worried I will have postpartum depression over my desire to do theoretical work, on things like quantum computing, complexity, and mathematical theory.
I’m an engineer doing research and designing processes for identifying and separating materials, working for a company with a few hundred employees. I have a lot of free reign, being one of only a few engineers working on several projects and in one case basically the only one working on the project. I like it a lot. I’m easy to please, but I suspect many engineers have worse jobs. Doing research in a field with lots of relatively low-hanging fruit is nice work if you can get it.
I have an opportunity that is kind of like this only within my area of statistical machine learning. A large entertainment company is looking to hire a few developers / engineers to do data mining on various things, ranging from visual features of advertisements and web content to user click statistics. The goal would be to make their web entertainment options more profitable and more monetizable. At first, this sounded dull to me. But after thinking more about it, using mathematics in this manner could be somewhat fun. I like data mining and machine learning, and they are really looking for someone who knows real mathematics and can work autonomously to develop novel statistical approaches to their monetization tasks. The autonomy sounds kind of high in this job, even though it would all be focused on making more money. This sounds better to me than a financial analyst job (similar job description, but the working hours would be far worse) and it also sounds better than a job doing military type research, which is one of the other things I can do with machine learning.
I’m a little scared to jump ship into the entertainment industry, though. I’m worried I will have postpartum depression over my desire to do theoretical work, on things like quantum computing, complexity, and mathematical theory.