HACKER Q&A
📣 happyjack

Contract work for engineer / scientific computing


Hi HN,

Longtime lurker / commenter, first time poster. Anyways I'm wondering if there is any interest / market for a contractor to write MATLAB, FORTRAN, run simulations, plot data (i.e. engineer)? My background is in petroleum (reservoir, hydrology) engineering and I ran servers, wrote MATLAB, Mathematica, wrote papers & documentation, ran simulators, etc.. Long story short, I did consulting / contract work for a few years and the industry has changed and people are getting pushed out. I don't really have interest in furthering my oil / gas career, but I have 10 years of experience as an "engineer" and would like to profit from it. I'm currently doing some applied research projects and wrenching on aircraft.

Wondering if there is any contract work out there? I enjoy my work with aircraft but would be interested in 20-30 hours a week to supplement my work at a higher billable rate.

Hope to hear from the community.


  👤 JoeMayoBot Accepted Answer ✓
One of the ways to find out is to visit the job sites and do research. I like Indeed.com. Linked-In is another decent place to search. If you post a resume, recruiters will likely reach out and be happy to discuss what they're seeing in the market regarding your skill-set/interests/desired compensation. You might also try Meetup.com to see if there are any groups with people interested in what you're looking for because direct referrals (from networking) mean that you might not have to share your rate with a 3rd party.

Also, on the first day of each month, there's a HN thread for hire/hiring/contracting that you can read or add yourself to.