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I am looking to fill two permanent Mathematica developer positions. I think that many of the users of Mathematica.SE would be interested in a dedicated careers site, but I don't know how to reach them. I would guess that StackOverflow Careers isn't visited by everyone here.

Any ideas on how to advertise Mathematica job opportunities to SE users?

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The main message of this post is a plea to the StackExchange team, concerning better integration between our site and Careers.SO. I've joined the Mathematica tag on SO (while we were on SO) early enough to witness and contribute to the development of our community since the early stages, and I think that such better integration will be of a great mutual benefit for both us and SE.

I would add to the answer of Szabolcs (which I completely agree with), that our (Mathematica) community is unlike any other SE community with a dedicated site (as opposed to StackOverflow), because I believe that our community here is in a large part a programming community. It is not just that (and that's why we have a separate site), but the programming aspect is crucial.

So, many of us are programmers (some in addition to being researchers or educators or industry professionals), and yet as a community we currently don't benefit from Careers.SO, unlike all those gathered in various tags under SO umbrella. This is because the SO Careers site is not integrated with Mathematica SE, and so the potential employers (such as the OP of this question) don't see any potential candidates, while those of us here who are looking for a job have currently vanishingly small chances to see any open Mathematica development positions in a timely manner.

At the same time, Wolfram Mathematica, being the best (in my opinion, but it is shared by lots of people) techincal computing platform today, has millions of users and thousands of commercial users, and the user base is rapidly expanding. Each new version brings about a huge number of new features, and Mathematica as a programming language /platform is currently in the process of rapidly moving from being (perceived as) a rather specialized software for doing Mathematics to a general-purpose computing environment used by a growing number of industries. I therefore expect that the number of Mathematica jobs will grow rather rapidly in the next few years.

So, SE team, this is a call for you: support some ways to better integrate our community with the Careers SO site, provide ways for employers looking for Mathematica developers to connect to Mathematica.SE users, and you won't regret it!

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As of now, there's a grand total of — 1 job in Mathematica on careers.stackoverflow! Great.

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This discussion has come up before, often times informally, and I realized that the main reason Mathematica users and employers don't use careers.stackoverflow is because the careers site is not attractive to a typical Mathematica employee/employer. For starters, here's the homepage:

enter image description here

It's pretty heavy on Java/PHP/Ruby/C#, etc., and all the jobs near me are mainly in these areas — stuff I'm the least bit interested in. This is not in any way a criticism of SE; it's just the harsh reality of the situation in the real world.

What's needed then, is a way to make make the site attractive to users of this community. The following are some ways in which this can be done:

  • SE can add a careers link from our home page (just like on SO) and clicking on that takes you to a page showing only users with Mathematica skills and jobs needing Mathematica expertise.
  • It would be nice if it had a design similar to the main site and perhaps a URL like mathematica.stackexchange.com/careers
  • We could have a beta phase (just like for the site) during which employers (who are active here or are prowling this site) can add jobs listings and users of this site can add their completed profiles. Once there's a critical mass, the link can be added to the page permanently.
  • Publicize at the Wolfram Technology Conference (will have to wait a year for that)
  • Partner with WRI to increase reach to the industries/universities that rely on heavy computations. This is an area where WRI is lacking (compared to The Mathworks), and some kind of mutually beneficial agreement could be arrived at.
  • Publicize at scientific conferences/workshops/etc. — the typical places you'll find a Mathematica user.

I've been told that the current careers2.0 design allows users to add answers from any SE site, so technically one could use it to advertise their profile. Yet, adoption is very low among our members because no one considers it a viable medium for job hunting. There are at present 351 profiles that list Mathematica in their skills list (some of you might recognize them from the locations), but they are mostly token profiles created because they received an email from SE when we were still a tag on SO.

I think making the site attractive to the community would go a long way in getting users to adopt it. Considering that there is no equivalent of a jobs site for Mathematica users, it would even give SE a good head start over the competition (if and when it launches).

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    Getting people to post their profiles is probably the easier part. Getting people to post job announcements might be more difficult. I imagine less of those people who are looking for Mathematica programmers will already know about Mathematica.SE (and Mathematica.SE is the point of entry to whichever career/job site we'll choose to work with). What do you think about this?
    – Szabolcs
    Nov 14, 2012 at 19:51
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    @Szabolcs I already addressed that with the suggestion for private beta where folks who need to hire advertise and users looking for it fill up their profiles. We'll have to bootstrap somehow, and the best way to do it is by taking this community's help. People like David and others who are looking can post ads, or if anyone knows someone who's looking can forward an invitation to them, etc. In the end, employers and employees are both necessary... No one would advertise in a place where there are no candidates and no one would keep a profile active and updated if there's no one posting jobs.
    – rm -rf Mod
    Nov 14, 2012 at 19:54
  • Regarding publicizing at the Wolfram Technology Conference, this year Stephen Wolfram mentioned in his keynote a plan to start some form of Mathematica jobs marketplace. Wolfram might be willing to build something if SO doesnt.
    – David Creech
    Nov 14, 2012 at 20:06
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    I think a career link in the top bar that looks something like career(3) if there are 3 new jobs would be clicked a lot
    – ssch
    Nov 14, 2012 at 21:46
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    @David The site Stephen mentioned is actually available already, at the bottom of wolfram.com/company/careers/index.html
    – Brett Champion
    Nov 15, 2012 at 4:19
  • @BrettChampion Isn't that for careers at WRI? David was referring to a general Linkedin/SO Careers like market place for mma specific jobs. Or was that not what Stephen was referring to? Edit: Ok, there's a small blurb at the very bottom...
    – rm -rf Mod
    Nov 15, 2012 at 4:49
  • @rm-rf I didn't see an obvious way to link directly to it, which didn't help..
    – Brett Champion
    Nov 15, 2012 at 5:01
  • @BrettChampion That is a good start. I think it could be improved by making it a separate section or at least a seprate page on the website, allowing more detailed job descriptions, and perhaps a form to request more information directly.
    – David Creech
    Nov 15, 2012 at 17:23
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    @BrettChampion it looks like there are third party jobs listed there too (at the bottom) but to get information you have to go through WRI. A proper job listing site should enable people to obtain information about the job and contact details directly.
    – Mike Honeychurch
    Nov 17, 2012 at 23:38
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    @BrettChampion I emailed job_market@wolfram.com 6 days ago about the job ads. Still waiting for a reply. Not a promising start.
    – Mike Honeychurch
    Nov 23, 2012 at 0:38
  • @MikeHoneychurch Interesting. I don't know who runs that, but will look into it.
    – Brett Champion
    Nov 23, 2012 at 2:39
  • Still no reply. Can others reading this send them an email and see if you get a reply.
    – Mike Honeychurch
    Nov 27, 2012 at 6:28
  • @BrettChampion After waiting 11 days I got a reply to my email. The reply contained no information about the job, the company, closing dates etc. Send us your details and they will forward them on. !!
    – Mike Honeychurch
    Nov 28, 2012 at 3:45
  • @BrettChampion early in the new year I sent another email since it had been 6 weeks without any information about the jobs!!! No reply. It has now been 2 months since my first email. Remember that the link on the WRI job site is titled "Request more information".
    – Mike Honeychurch
    Jan 17, 2013 at 22:59
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If Stack Overflow Careers could get a little more support for Mathematica / Mathematica.SE (as RM mentioned in chat), a first step would be placing an advertisement on Mathematica.SE linking to Mathematica-related jobs on Careers.

Probably most people here don't know about the Careers site yet, or don't expect it to be useful for Mathematica-related jobs, so never look at it. First we'd need to make sure that there are job announcement there (like yours), then let Mathematica users know about it through an ad.

P.S. Personally I think that it's not really important how exactly this is set up, through Careers or another site, but something is definitely needed, and I believe it would be popular.

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