141–150 of 176 posts
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Freedom to move, don't want to deal with burdens of ownership, better ROI to rent, etc.
Can you describe better ROI to rent more in detail?
https://medium.com/@usaar33/why-you-shouldnt-buy-a-home-in-t...
https://medium.com/@usaar33/an-up-to-date-buy-or-rent-calcul...
How replicable is this thing? Looking from a monetary perspective, is it worth getting a Ph.D. in AI? Assuming you like both academic research and working in the industry, if you were to make a choice whether to do a Ph.D. or not, how would you make it?
No, it's not. Im an AI researcher at a big tech company. It would have been far wiser financially to start as a software engineer after my Bachelor's. Also, having a few NEURIPS or ICML papers is not a hiring guarantee any more. It's decidedly not 2015-17 any longer. In particular, I feel bad for the people who started their PhDs with $$$ in their eyes around that time. Don't get me wrong, they will all be employable…
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$200k in the bay area is like $90k where I'm from. It's a decent living, but if you've got a family it's not exactly upper class.
Off-topic: Reminds me of "Half a mil in twenties like a billion where I'm from." On-topic: that's misleading; once you pay fixed costs, you have a lot more latitude for discretionary income. Not everything is the same ratio more expensive in the Bay Area.
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Whatever you do don't look up what Uber offered him to leave waymo...
The $680 MM that was also contingent on milestones he never hit and thus was never paid? Not to mention that was distributed across other people as well, although he was supposed to get the vast majority. Also he's likely going to end up in jail because of what happened with that Uber fiasco. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-08-27/ex-google-...
That said, my exiting salary at some companies was dramatically higher than my salary when I joined because the stock had appreciated and so had my compensation. And if someone wants to hire me away that's the compensation they have to deal with, not my initial comp.
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In fairness, I suspect it depends on what you're juggling. I could envision someone juggling management of an electric car company and a space exploration technologies company making bank.
I think it's far more likely this person would realize juggling so much is harder than he thought, and it all comes crashing down in the end (including his net worth).
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The $680 MM that was also contingent on milestones he never hit and thus was never paid? Not to mention that was distributed across other people as well, although he was supposed to get the vast majority. Also he's likely going to end up in jail because of what happened with that Uber fiasco. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-08-27/ex-google-...
That he turns out to be a scumbag seems orthogonal to his compensation. He would have gotten that money if he had delivered, no? That said, my exiting salary at some companies was dramatically higher than my salary when I joined because the stock had appreciated and so had my compensation. And if someone wants to hire me away that's the compensation they have to deal with, not my initial comp.
Anyway this is all a digression away from the fact that you are wildly misrepresenting salaries. You're also ignoring the two companies he sold to Google as part of his compensation. If you're interested you should google a bit about 510 Systems because the history is actually interesting, especially with the added knowledge of the founder becoming a total scumbag.
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It's certainly possible. You just don't own a home, you rent. It's much like NYC in that regard - you don't own a detached home in NYC regardless of how rich you are, you rent a swanky loft or penthouse. At most you might buy a condo, but you can still find plenty of hedge fund managers or Google engineers that rent their permanent residence (and sometimes have over $1M in liquid assets). In my wife's mom's group (wh…
Very interesting how affluent people still rent. I noticed the same in LA in a high end building. What is the reason? Having more money to invest in different asset classes instead of the biggest chunk being in real estate?
On a pragmatic level, high-income people who rent often have jobs that require a large level of geographic flexibility to get their maximum salary. Think of your professional skillset & network as an asset that various companies can "rent" for different rates, depending on how much value it adds to them. Different companies will pay wildly different amounts for that; it doesn't make sense to buy if you get a 50% raise by moving to a different city (or just a different area of your metro region) but costs of selling your house eat up several months salaries.
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If you have a family it’s not possible. Home prices average close to $1m. You’d have to save an entire years salary PRE tax to afford the down payment. That will take years and years to save. If you’re raising a family you’ll likely need two $200k incomes to afford a house, and even then, it’ll take at least 2 years to save for the down payment. The Bay Area is for college kids and millionaires. That’s it.
It’s possible. Family of 5 renting (around 3k) in the bay with 100k salary is certainly possible. Lived like this for over a decade. Now moving onto college.
Here's how it worked out: $100k salary = $74k after tax, so that's about $6k per month take home. $3000 per month for rent leaves $3000 for everything else.
My wife and I have $1000 per month on our student loans. So we're down to $2000 per month. Health insurance and medication was $600 a month for the two of us, down to $1400. Groceries worked out to about $600 a month as well, down to $800. We got around via muni, so that takes off $200 per month for passes, down to $600. Electricity, water, internet, and cell came to about $200 per month. That left $400 for entertainment, incidentals, and savings.
And that was for 2 of us. I can't imagine 5, but kudos for doing it.
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> Would you say that you'd have got an AI researcher position without a Ph.D.? It's difficult to get any true researcher position without a PhD. It doesn't mean that PhD has to be in AI. Research involves a lot of reading and writing papers, which a PhD is supposedly training you how to do. That said most places will say "equivalent practical experience" and it's entirely possible to be competent in AI/ML without a P…
>I did a PhD in space science, I now do machine learning in ecology and spent the summer working on machine learning for disaster management. Do you think it is possible to that without any background in anything? I mean could someone apply black box frameworks without understanding them. How would they be caught?
To do machine learning research? Or work in some random domain?
> I mean could someone apply black box frameworks without understanding them. How would they be caught?
Machine learning is rapidly becoming commoditised, but lots of people still don't understand just how much effort it is to get a good dataset and to prep
Domain experts scoff at machine learning people who are trying to solve Big Problems using unrepresentative toy datasets, but also tend to have much higher expectations of what ML can do. Machine learning people scoff at domain experts for using outdated techniques and bad data science, but then propose ridiculous solutions that would never work in the real world (e.g. use our model, it takes a week on 8xV100s to train and you can only run it on a computer the size of a bus).
There are also a lot of people (and companies) touting machine learning as a solution to problems that don't exist.
Overfitting models is probably the most rampant crime that researchers commit.
Just FYI I made $millions doing CRUD apps for enterprise. I spent most of it on accommodation and food so not as sexy as AI I guess