Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Machine Learning Job Market

evjang.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 276 posts

Re: The Machine Learning Job Market

#141

Post by filoleg »

angarg12 wrote: post #70

I don't want to derail the conversation, but OPs career path really stood out to me. He graduated in 2016, worked at Google in Bay Area, and now is joining a startup at a VP level. I graduated in 2008, obtained a PhD in 2014 in a no name EU university, worked in odd companies for a while and joined FAANG 4 years ago as a mid level developer, where I am still ATM. Looking at this disparity I wonder what could be possi…

Without knowing the deatils, it is mostly #4, with a good doze of #3, and potentially a decent amount of #1.

Basically, yeah, small/not-yet-massive startups have insane overinflation in titles. Had plenty of former college classmates who became "VPs" or "staff engineers" at super small startups a couple years out of college. Getting plenty of recruiter messages on linkedin myself for "staff engineer" positions at random startups, despite me not even being a senior at a FAANG yet, and only being about 4.5 years out of college.

Another thing is, no matter how smart or hard working you are, being in the right place at the right time is extremely important. It won't help much if you lack skills, but being in the right place at the right time is like a force multiplier on your skills and the work you do. Which is partially why most of the big opportunities are still heavily concentrated in a few geographic spots (despite there being no tangible technical need for that).

Don't beat yourself up over it, titles don't mean that much. You are able to start a one-man-shop LLC and call yourself a VP, a director, or whatever else you want. The real question is, with that title, are they being compensated as much as you are? If they decide to quit and get a job at a "regular" tech company after, will that VP title translate into anything more than an L4/L5? Just some food for thought.

Re: The Machine Learning Job Market

#142

Post by queuebert »

axg11 wrote: post #95
queuebert wrote: post #93

"Product impact is even slower than robotics due to regulatory capture by hospitals and insurance companies." The author apparently does not understand regulatory capture and is throwing around catch phrases to sound smart. Regulatory capture would imply that healthcare encounters less regulation than it should due to influence over the relevant government agencies. This should increase product impact and reduce time…

Doesn't the author's sentence mean: hospitals and insurance companies have coopted regulators for the benefits of their own businesses, at the detriment of medical device companies (developing AI)? I think the author's point still stands.

Possibly that was the intended meaning, but the point is still invalid. Hospitals want more cool gadgets. They want to be able to treat more conditions and charge more for it. If anything, the FDA is a constant annoyance to a healthcare provider because it hamstrings them from providing care. This is why so many patients are enrolled in clinical trials, to get care ahead of the FDA approval time frame.

Re: The Machine Learning Job Market

#143

Post by sleepdreamy »

time_to_smile wrote: post #98
angarg12 wrote: post #70

I don't want to derail the conversation, but OPs career path really stood out to me. He graduated in 2016, worked at Google in Bay Area, and now is joining a startup at a VP level. I graduated in 2008, obtained a PhD in 2014 in a no name EU university, worked in odd companies for a while and joined FAANG 4 years ago as a mid level developer, where I am still ATM. Looking at this disparity I wonder what could be possi…

Tech has a bad habit of conflating comp/prestige with skill. I have no doubt the OP is quite good at what they do, but you not being where OP is does not therefore imply you don't have skill. Unfortunately the tech world is not really a meritocracy. When I look at my own circle of technical people the most incredible ones from a pure technical ability are divided between working at FAANG making 500k+ and working a re…

There is more to being a great tech employee than just being 'brilliant' at the hard skills. Soft skills are just as important, and play a role behind why I have been promoted more than peers who surpass my skills ten-fold. Some people also don't want to be in management.

We all have different trajectories and choices. This comment makes it seem like if you aren't a technical wizard then you might as well be useless. This is not reality

Re: The Machine Learning Job Market

#145

Post by akhmatova »

In the future, every successful tech company will use their data moats to build some variant of an Artificial General Intelligence.

Is that what one gets paid 7 figures for - to go out in public and claim they "know" things like this with a straight face?

Re: The Machine Learning Job Market

#146

Post by mysterEFrank »

opensrcken wrote: post #101

The post is not only too braggadocious for my taste, but some of the figures quoted are highly unlikely. I would personally not work for someone with this kind of ego, but there are many such people in positions of power. This article is representative of an attitude I'm seeing around the tech industry, and if this is indeed the level of "confidence" in the Bay, I don't think that's a good sign.

Eric Jang is top ML talent, these numbers are accurate. I work in ML and have followed his work for years

Re: The Machine Learning Job Market

#147

Post by PartiallyTyped »

visarga wrote: post #140
rdedev wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading comments like this is a bummer. I am currently doing my masters with a focus on NLP. At this point I'll be pretty happy to get a job even if it just boils down to only deploying ML models. Even for such a role of companies expect years of experience or a PhD I don't know how I can even get a job in the first place

I sometimes interview candidates for ML engineering roles, and let me tell you most of them have trouble with basic concepts. It's great when I find someone fluent, for a change.

Basic concepts referring to what precisely?

Re: The Machine Learning Job Market

#148

Post by davnn »

mysterEFrank wrote: post #146
opensrcken wrote: post #101

The post is not only too braggadocious for my taste, but some of the figures quoted are highly unlikely. I would personally not work for someone with this kind of ego, but there are many such people in positions of power. This article is representative of an attitude I'm seeing around the tech industry, and if this is indeed the level of "confidence" in the Bay, I don't think that's a good sign.

Eric Jang is top ML talent, these numbers are accurate. I work in ML and have followed his work for years

Still.. do you think being a top talent in ML guarantees success for your own company, for example? I think there are a lot of valuable skills to have, being an expert in X is just one of them.

Re: The Machine Learning Job Market

#149

Post by hintymad »

awinter-py wrote: post #10

> The most important deciding factor for me was whether the company has some kind of technological edge years ahead of its competitors. A friend on Google’s logging team tells me he’s not interested in smaller companies because they are so technologically far behind Google’s planetary-scale infra that they haven’t even begun to fathom the problems that Google is solving now, much less finish solving the problems that…

I think this reasoning is flawed. Joining Google does not mean you get to solve interesting problems because you will most likely contribute incrementally to a vast body of work. You want to build the next-gen database? You have to come up with something way better than BigTable and Spanner. You want to build a queue service? You've got to come up with something way better than Google's PubSub, which optimizes itself all the way down to the level of GBP protocols. You want to build a machine learning framework? Have you checked out TensorFlow and JAX in particular their ecosystem? You want to build a file system? Are you sure you can overcome all the organizational inertia that Google has built on Colossus over the years? You want to build a 10X more productive framework for data processing? Are you sure you can beat DataFlow or Flume4J-ecosystem in Google?

The point is, Google is a mature company. Mortals like most of us don't get to break ground in a technically advanced but mature company like Google. Instead, we find fast growing new problems to solve, to hone our skill, and to get to scale.

P.S., I personally know a number of prominent professors used to work on the Borg projects just to optimize for a few percent of gains. It's deep and interesting work, but nonetheless hard for mortals like me to get much out of.

That is, it's a more sure bet to work for a baby Google than to work for a middle-aged Google.

Re: The Machine Learning Job Market

#150

Post by ankeshanand »

digitallyfree wrote: post #35
1024core wrote: post #26

"FAANG+similar : Low 7 figures compensation (staff level), technological lead on compute (~10 yr)" I don't know where OP is getting these figures from, but I doubt that FAANGs offer 7-figure comps to Staff-level people. It's probably more in the higher 6-figure level (400K - 600K).

I'd be interested in a credible source for this as well, even though ML work pays more. From what I know from people in the industry it's 6 not 7 figures.

https://aipaygrad.es/
Post reply on HN