[thisrod]

I succeeded at this. My academic physics career petered out, then I stumbled into an industry role with almost as much physics as I was doing in my quantum mechanics postdoc.

The jobs you're looking for are rare, but they do exist. There must be a bunch of them in this project, for example:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-22/lake-george-earthquak...

In my case, the unicorn factor worked both ways. The job was advertised for a year before my hiking partner encouraged me to apply, and it took a few months more before I did. From that point, the job was easy to get.

In this job market, supply and demand are reasonably well matched; the problem is that the market is very illiquid. Science jobs are rare to begin with, and people stay in them for decades, so vacancies are even rarer.

On the one hand, a programmer at my company who was interested and capable of switching to optics could have had my role by asking for it. On the other hand, if you joined the company as a programmer, you would have had to wait 5 years for an optics role to come up.

So my advice is to stay in touch with your friends from the earth science days, and expect this to take a long time. Good luck!

[ecophyseis]

Thank! I actually worked with people in that article :) Now I'm based in Europe so my grad school friends work at companies in a different continent, so so far, no luck there.