Ask HN: Is Operations Research still a thing?

Hey there! I have a B.S. in Information & Systems Engineering, which includes Operations Research (OR). Happy to chat about this!

When I graduated, the OR term was already fading, and from what I’ve seen, it’s pretty much gone as a standalone field. The tools are still strong, but OR isn’t often listed as a job specialization on its own.

I started as a business analyst, and while OR wasn’t in any job descriptions, it gave me an edge. I used OR methods to go above and beyond, working closely with branch and executive management to analyze cost-effectiveness, optimize decisions, and make strategic recommendations. This helped me stay at the top of my pay band. Of course, I still handled traditional BA tasks like dashboards, reports, automation, and SQL.

My advice? Cross-specialize. OR is incredibly valuable, but it works best when paired with another strong skill set. For me, a CS minor and SQL/database skills helped early in my career.

To put it simply: OR lets you optimize a warehouse layout—but most jobs also require you to move boxes. It aligns more with engineering management roles than entry-level work, and those management positions typically go to people with industry experience.

That said, I genuinely believe OR is one of the best specializations when combined with another field. You just need to polish it with the right complementary skills.

(Full disclosure I used AI to clean up this message, but it's still very close to my initial draft. Mostly just some grammar and phrasing changes, but it does kind of read like AI now so I wanted to call it out that the sentiment is still genuine)

As far as connecting to other practitioners, I mostly just stay active in forums and joined a few LinkedIn groups but I need to improve in this area too, which is my motivation for posting this.

Google has OR Tools team that runs a publicly accessible discord. There's quite a few folk in there with industry experience who will likely be able to answer questions in the off-topic channel. Unfortunately I can't be of further assistance, but I hope this helps.

I suggest searching job adverts by tech rather than title since OR tech is very specific to it.

BS Physics and MS OR here. Loved both. I wish I took my OR classes way earlier. Just before I professionally retired I transitioned to a ML engineer job and knocked it out of the park. I was very well prepared w my skill set. In my opinion, too much of the data science field was getting dumbed down generating dashboards, etc. but the skill set was very valuable and I did advanced work. The OR community has a publication/society for analytics. Check out INFORMS. I’m not a fan of it as o think it misses the direction needed for ML. I think they are trying to refocus and address this. But the OR conferences are large. I actually like the decision science field better, moving up in management and making the right decisions and being able to articulate the reasoning was always important to me.