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Imagine developing a core competency for your company where it's complicated enough that you're not sure what route to take. Also assume you have a team of mayb

Imagine developing a core competency for your company where it's complicated enough that you're not sure what route to take. Also assume you have a team of maybe 8-10 ML engineers who all make what ML engineers make. It makes so much more sense to pay $25k to get direct knowledge of systems and techniques versus your team spending a bunch of time exploring different products/methods/algos to find something that might work in the end, or might fail in a few months. $25k is like 5 MacBooks, hardly worth thinking about versus being able to get experienced direction from someone who has done what you're trying to do and saving your team literally hundreds of hours of exploratory work. It's not really a game, it's good sense. Yeah given the covo here I probably could have negotiated them down, but that's my time doing that and then things have to be vetted with outside counsel and the CFO, also time wasted, versus just telling them this is what the person charges, we need them for 50 hours, "authorize the charges please." And at what cost, saving a few thousand dollars?

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
How do you develop a business connection and market your service as being more valuable that the wide abundance of free materials, engineering blogs, research papers, etc., in this space? Just for example, I run a team of 10 machine learning engineers at a large ecommerce company. We mostly do NLP and computer vision, some time series forecasting. I cannot imagine ever paying anything close to $25k for consulting advice, that’s just bananas to me. We recently purchased licenses to use the data annotation tool prodigy from the spaCy creators at explosion.ai. That was ~$4000 and the decision whether to build our own data annotation system or not was excruciating, involved all kinds of business documentation, RFCs, approvals, NDA processes, etc. It was deeply non-trivial to procure that, and building our own was a very serious option we pursued with tech specs and prototypes and everything. Spending 6x that amount for _advice_ about NLP, which practically grows on trees today, is just totally unrealistic. It makes me suspect the real target customer for you is not companies with actual ML engineering teams or ambitious data-driven projects, but more like someone looking for McKinsey-lite. Some place that has no serious ML use case beyond drop-in pretrained models and sees $25k as the cheaper path to rubber stamp certification that dissolves internal political feuds. Most likely just selling super cookie cutter NLP models as if they are advanced and represent some sexy leap forward for a company with a couple junior data scientists. Algolia or just some drop-in Elastic tfidf search is more than enough for these companies. Spend the $25k on an intern who can tell you anything you need to know about neural network frameworks. In reality, the 4-5 ML engineers you already hired are very likely more knowledgeable than the freelance consultant you might hire. They can tell you much more about state of the art and simultaneously know the specific integration path in your company’s web service and data ecosystem. Those folks won’t be wasting time prototyping - they would be pursuing a more efficient way to get the answers you need than advice from a freelancer, even if that freelancer was Bengio for pete’s sake. I just cannot see the value prop here except for the usual story of paying for consulting as a virtue signal / credential / politics kind of thing.
- ganstyles 6y ago
  I just really don't know what to tell you, I'm sorry. We saw the value, pursued the person, and had an engagement with them effectively consulting for 50 hours. There was no justification to anyone outside of our team, other than getting the very quick approval, and the consultant worked with our team directly and not to anyone outside the team. There was no internal politics at play. And again, this wasn't a "freelance consultant" in the sense of the original story posted to HN, but an accomplished person at a very respected company who was able to secure the approvals from their side to help us out. This was novel/niche work for which "drop in pretrained models" don't really exist or apply. Frankly to judge and belittle someone else who is just sharing their experience by saying they're not doing serious work and don't have serious customers is very rude.
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    It’s not rude at all to highlight how this warrants huge skepticism. “Just calling someone up” to spend $25k+ on “advice” and claiming it’s justified in time saved of your existing staff not flailing around to research the same topic is _very_ weird. That doesn’t line up with any professional experience I’ve ever seen in any machine learning team at Fortune 500, startup, finance & academia jobs. _Maybe_ for appearance fees to have a big name researcher come and give a company presentation or keynote. _Maybe_. Absolutely not believing it for ad hoc freelance consulting based on someone having some NLP projects on GitHub, conference presentations or publications, or gigs at “fancy” AI employers, and I find it’s worth making this comment so other readers can consider how extremely shaky that premise is.
    - arbitrary_name 6y ago
      Just to provide another perspective : I've consulted for 20+ companies. Spending money for outside advice or actual work products is extremely common and generally worthwhile if done right. There's a reason why consulting is a multi billion dollar industry.
      - 6y ago
cosmodisk 6y ago
Our company was thinking of going after this very large contact,waaaay out of our league. We had experiences in some,but not all areas.We hired an expensive contractor to draft proposals, submit necessary information amd etc.When we read what the guy has produced,it was clear that it would have taken ages to get even half of it+ we would have skipped tons of things.So it was worth it. In a sam way, I could walk into almost any business using certain software and give advice,which would result in cost reductions, optimisations and etc,so I could justify charging $1500 a day or so,as an example.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

How do you develop a business connection and market your service as being more valuable that the wide abundance of free materials, engineering blogs, research papers, etc., in this space? Just for example, I run a team of 10 machine learning engineers at a large ecommerce company. We mostly do NLP and computer vision, some time series forecasting. I cannot imagine ever paying anything close to $25k for consulting advice, that’s just bananas to me. We recently purchased licenses to use the data annotation tool prodigy from the spaCy creators at explosion.ai. That was ~$4000 and the decision whether to build our own data annotation system or not was excruciating, involved all kinds of business documentation, RFCs, approvals, NDA processes, etc. It was deeply non-trivial to procure that, and building our own was a very serious option we pursued with tech specs and prototypes and everything. Spending 6x that amount for _advice_ about NLP, which practically grows on trees today, is just totally unrealistic. It makes me suspect the real target customer for you is not companies with actual ML engineering teams or ambitious data-driven projects, but more like someone looking for McKinsey-lite. Some place that has no serious ML use case beyond drop-in pretrained models and sees $25k as the cheaper path to rubber stamp certification that dissolves internal political feuds. Most likely just selling super cookie cutter NLP models as if they are advanced and represent some sexy leap forward for a company with a couple junior data scientists. Algolia or just some drop-in Elastic tfidf search is more than enough for these companies. Spend the $25k on an intern who can tell you anything you need to know about neural network frameworks. In reality, the 4-5 ML engineers you already hired are very likely more knowledgeable than the freelance consultant you might hire. They can tell you much more about state of the art and simultaneously know the specific integration path in your company’s web service and data ecosystem. Those folks won’t be wasting time prototyping - they would be pursuing a more efficient way to get the answers you need than advice from a freelancer, even if that freelancer was Bengio for pete’s sake. I just cannot see the value prop here except for the usual story of paying for consulting as a virtue signal / credential / politics kind of thing.

ganstyles 6y ago
I just really don't know what to tell you, I'm sorry. We saw the value, pursued the person, and had an engagement with them effectively consulting for 50 hours. There was no justification to anyone outside of our team, other than getting the very quick approval, and the consultant worked with our team directly and not to anyone outside the team. There was no internal politics at play. And again, this wasn't a "freelance consultant" in the sense of the original story posted to HN, but an accomplished person at a very respected company who was able to secure the approvals from their side to help us out. This was novel/niche work for which "drop in pretrained models" don't really exist or apply. Frankly to judge and belittle someone else who is just sharing their experience by saying they're not doing serious work and don't have serious customers is very rude.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  It’s not rude at all to highlight how this warrants huge skepticism. “Just calling someone up” to spend $25k+ on “advice” and claiming it’s justified in time saved of your existing staff not flailing around to research the same topic is _very_ weird. That doesn’t line up with any professional experience I’ve ever seen in any machine learning team at Fortune 500, startup, finance & academia jobs. _Maybe_ for appearance fees to have a big name researcher come and give a company presentation or keynote. _Maybe_. Absolutely not believing it for ad hoc freelance consulting based on someone having some NLP projects on GitHub, conference presentations or publications, or gigs at “fancy” AI employers, and I find it’s worth making this comment so other readers can consider how extremely shaky that premise is.
  - arbitrary_name 6y ago
    Just to provide another perspective : I've consulted for 20+ companies. Spending money for outside advice or actual work products is extremely common and generally worthwhile if done right. There's a reason why consulting is a multi billion dollar industry.
    - 6y ago

cosmodisk 6y ago

Our company was thinking of going after this very large contact,waaaay out of our league. We had experiences in some,but not all areas.We hired an expensive contractor to draft proposals, submit necessary information amd etc.When we read what the guy has produced,it was clear that it would have taken ages to get even half of it+ we would have skipped tons of things.So it was worth it. In a sam way, I could walk into almost any business using certain software and give advice,which would result in cost reductions, optimisations and etc,so I could justify charging $1500 a day or so,as an example.