Very comprehensive and interesting article! Also, it's amazing how similar we are!

I studied in a school with a very deep background in math, physics and IT and it also took me exactly 6 months to get my first offer.

I think Data Science is a good field for physicists as you constantly have to learn new things and grasp a lot of concepts. Technically ML and physics are very similar in themselves, as in both fields you create a theory (model) based on experimental data, fit it and use it to make predictions.