4 ms·

I feel sorry for you :(. Are you a developer or a scientist?

• w_t_payne 13y ago
  I am a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. I generally bill myself as the "&" in R&D, bridging the gap between academic researchers & mathematicians and mainstream software engineering. I.e. I can do a bit of classifier design, but most of my focus tends to be on build systems, automated test systems, parameter tuning, data quality monitoring and all the nuts-and-bolts stuff that most researchers don't want to be bothered with. I am way too OCD to spend my day producing "research quality" code, and too wary of BS for my output to be just research reports and academic papers. I prefer shipping product, if you know what I mean? I lost interest in DeepMind when I could not figure out what their business was after a couple of interviews. (The startup that I was previously working for had just run out of money). More fool me. Heh.
  • 11001 13y ago
    What impression did they give you during the interviews? In retrospect, do you think that was their whole goal, to get acquihired by Google?
    • w_t_payne 13y ago
      Yes, in retrospect, I think that was the goal. They were interested in me for work on their machine vision product (my area of expertise), but the spiel was very much around how they had built up one of the world's best machine learning research groups. Over the years I have seen many great academics fail to produce much commercially, so perhaps I was less impressed with that than I should have been. :-)
  • _random_ 13y ago
    I still can't figure out what their business is to be frank. I get the research part but not the monetization part. I guess acqui-hire by design.