Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts • Hacker News Board

Re: Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts

#21

Post by aerio » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 12:21 AM UTC

yellowcake0 wrote: post #20

Good lord, AI engineers get paid a median salary of $243,500, while non-AI engineers only get paid a median of $166,750, how can it be so much more? Is it because AI jobs are more concentrated in big tech?

There are way more non-AI engineers than actual AI-engineers.

Re: Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts

#22

Post by WinLychee » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 2:07 AM UTC

yellowcake0 wrote: post #20

Good lord, AI engineers get paid a median salary of $243,500, while non-AI engineers only get paid a median of $166,750, how can it be so much more? Is it because AI jobs are more concentrated in big tech?

The knowledge is harder to come by, and the field is (relatively) new. You need a fusion of data engineering, math, software engineering, and data analysis. Plus the ability to read and implement esoteric papers hot off the press, or in some cases innovate a new technique/module/architecture that hasn't been done before.

Oh, and you need to be able to do all the above _quickly_.

What's nice about it versus SWE is that you can totally ship hot garbage, doesn't have to be optimal at all, just "fast enough" and cheap enough.

Re: Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts

#23

Post by plaguepilled » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 2:39 PM UTC

My problem with AI is that I just don't think it does the advertised task well. It really annoys me that the tech space in my area is increasingly 'embracing' AI* instead of things like Nix, Rust, Haskell, which are doing really cool things in the broader tech sphere.

*On that note: the phrase 'embracing AI' sounds so slimy. Why do I need to hug the robot?

Re: Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts

#24

Post by jtsymonds » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

tommasoamici wrote: post #4

It’s not just tech workers, it’s also tech projects. Compare how minio has advertised itself through the years: 2023: High Performance Object Storage for AI [0] 2022: High Performance, Kubernetes Native Object Storage [1] 2020: MinIO is a high performance object storage server compatible with Amazon S3 APIs [2] I get that buzzwords and marketing are important, but it rubs me the wrong way [0] https://web.archive.org/…

Uhh, they were using AI moniker in 2019. They just circled back to it this year:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190428005007/https://min.io/