Since everyone is talking about hype in ML, I wish there was some hype for good ole' conversional scientific computing. Yes, it's not so sexy, you have to build your own model yourself, and then the hard work is in finding and verifying a suitable numerical method and finally devising a solid implementation. It requires a vast number of different skills, anything from pure math to low level programming and it is definitely not trivial work, but it does not seem like it pays that well.
It's also a lot of fun. For anyone that likes math, but also likes weird approximations, there's all kinds of juicy stuff in scientific computing. It will make you a better ML coder, too.
