[micheles]

I work as a research engineer in Italy. My path was academia (Physics)->industry (Finance)->mix. The "mix" where I am now is a strange case: it is located inside an university, nearly everybody has a PhD and we also have PhD students, but we are not academia, it is a private no profit company doing applied research. I am getting the same money I was getting in the industry but also 7+ weeks of vacation per year, more autonomy and less stress. Plus, I am not working to make rich people richer.

Most of my job is about optimizing numeric code, lots of numpy, pandas, numba but also thinking of new algorithms. I get respect and they put my name in the research papers they publish, even if I did not write a word in the paper and have no knowledge at all of the underlying science ;-) Such companies are rare but they do exist. Much better than academia because there is no bureaucracy. I got in because of a friend of a friend...

[iamcurious]

Sounds heavenly, are they hiring?