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I guess, I think there's too large of a pool of companies for anyone to really say what's a meaningfully "equal" or "worse" job. If Geico was opening a new mach

by komali2 7mo ago

I guess, I think there's too large of a pool of companies for anyone to really say what's a meaningfully "equal" or "worse" job. If Geico was opening a new machine learning division to do some really interesting work on the probably shitload of actuarial data they've built over the years, maybe someone from anthropic would be interested in that. Or maybe everyone gets laid off from anthropic because of an AI bubble burst, and now googlers are competing with anthropic people who are competing with walmart labs people, and each hiring team really has no way of knowing who's better than who based on resume alone because they've got fifty in the inbox with FAANG experience. Also I know plenty of people in startup world who are phenomenal engineers that only have companies I've never heard of on their resumes - startups that for one reason or another simply didn't have a news-grabbing exit.

Esophagus4 7mo ago
> If Geico was opening a new machine learning division to do some really interesting work on the probably shitload of actuarial data they've built over the years, maybe someone from anthropic would be interested in that But they’re not. And they won’t. And that is my point. They’d make a ML Engineer post on LinkedIn and get a bunch of people for whom Geico would be a step up. There will never be a job opening from Geico that someone at Anthropic would apply to. That’s my point - your pool will always be people who are in a worse position than your job. Being laid off is a worse position than a job. You’ll never see Anthropic candidates in a Geico hiring pool, unless they were laid off for being lousy and can’t find anything else. The market is pretty efficient - people wouldn’t bid for jobs that are worse than their current situation.
- komali2 7mo ago
  > The market is pretty efficient - people wouldn’t bid for jobs that are worse than their current situation. This still seems like an oversimplification. It's easy to label FAANG, "frontier AI companies," whatever else, but the vast majority of jobs and the vast majority of engineers are in a soup that's maybe able to be split between "startup world" and "enterprise world" but beyond that, difficult to say one is "worse" or "better." And I've worked alongside FAANG people in startup world so, either that isn't a "worse" job and therefore your theory doesn't work because that means it's not really possible to accurately evaluate every single company as objectively worse/better, or, your theory doesn't work because people do apply to "worse" jobs.

by komali2 7mo ago

Esophagus4 7mo ago

> If Geico was opening a new machine learning division to do some really interesting work on the probably shitload of actuarial data they've built over the years, maybe someone from anthropic would be interested in that But they’re not. And they won’t. And that is my point. They’d make a ML Engineer post on LinkedIn and get a bunch of people for whom Geico would be a step up. There will never be a job opening from Geico that someone at Anthropic would apply to. That’s my point - your pool will always be people who are in a worse position than your job. Being laid off is a worse position than a job. You’ll never see Anthropic candidates in a Geico hiring pool, unless they were laid off for being lousy and can’t find anything else. The market is pretty efficient - people wouldn’t bid for jobs that are worse than their current situation.

komali2 7mo ago
> The market is pretty efficient - people wouldn’t bid for jobs that are worse than their current situation. This still seems like an oversimplification. It's easy to label FAANG, "frontier AI companies," whatever else, but the vast majority of jobs and the vast majority of engineers are in a soup that's maybe able to be split between "startup world" and "enterprise world" but beyond that, difficult to say one is "worse" or "better." And I've worked alongside FAANG people in startup world so, either that isn't a "worse" job and therefore your theory doesn't work because that means it's not really possible to accurately evaluate every single company as objectively worse/better, or, your theory doesn't work because people do apply to "worse" jobs.