amznthrowaway5

23 ms·

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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
Not always true. For example, the AI/ML craze brought a lot of academics into industry and also brought a lot of their politics. For an AI/ML job at most places, prepare to be judged based on having the right credentials (good deg
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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
Yeah, this has been a well known problem in the field for a while now, and not just with DNN approaches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recommender_system#Reproducibi... These systems almost never work in production. The
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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
On one hand, I can see how the politicking and playing the game seems to be in the best interest of the company - look! We’re getting stuff done and it looks awesome! Often, behind the smoke and mirrors, not much is actually done. And the
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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
> I feel like there's about 1000 hours of high quality AI lectures available for free on the internet and while I do believe in a certain amount of selflessness in education, I am skeptical that any of that is providing more than a
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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
Salary is the important part, some companies will give out the title but not the corresponding salary. It's especially bad at places like Amazon, where you will often be given deferred and reduced compensation below the bottom of the n
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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
Can you go into more detail about what happened in your situations?
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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
L5 (Senior SWE) at Google, the position Michael was trying to get in the blog post.
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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
Yeah, if you keep your leetcode skills sharp and study to game the "design" interviews, you can get a job at a competing company instead of playing the depressing political game. As a bonus you'll make significantly more than
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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
(2014) old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925375
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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
He had 3.5 years of experience and those salaries are from 2012-2015. Skilled new grads can pull more than that nowadays.
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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
> the upside is that you get to work on something you care about As a counter example, I found this is far more true at big companies, where you can switch teams until you find one that fits your interest, then at a startup where you are
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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
The average at these companies may not be very good given the inherent noise in hiring and promo processes, but most very good engineers end up at one of these companies since it's a much better deal than going to a startup.
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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
> But these companies keep succeeding doing it this way, so I’m not sure what to make of it. That doesn't necessarily mean anything. The fact that a system might be working, doesn't mean it's anywhere near optimal. I thin
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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
What are the benefits to treating SDEs as fungible? At Amazon, Sr. Leadership and HR love to pretend all SDEs at a given level are interchangeable, level actually indicates competence, and leetcoding external hires with zero domain knowledg
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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
You did say > So you have this awful culture where everyone views themselves as this unbelievably valuable "alpha dog" In my experience this may be true of upper management, but it simply isn't true of most employees.
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by amznthrowaway5 7y ago
The majority of AMZN's tech employees (ie. average SDE) know they are not elite and often talk about how they consider themselves failures for not being getting into better paying companies.