Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts
#2A UK perspective on this is that the AI trend, as described in the article, would quickly turn into a class divide. Many employers in AI/ML spaces seem to want postgraduate degrees. Often the academic entry requirements to such degrees aren't that high (usually a bachelors degree with an "ok" mark like a 2:2 or a 2:1 min in a related subject - not exactly sky high attainment criteria) but the financial barriers are relatively severe - far poorer finance options are available as compared to undergraduate degrees especially.
The dynamic then seems to be that while software development has been functioning as a relatively effective source of social mobility, if you can do the work you can create a decent career, the current AI wave threatens to pull up the ladder for many if this trend carries on as described.
That said I'm not too worried about it playing out like that yet, at least not in the medium term. I think industry is at some pinnacle of optimism around AI but don't quite realise that it's not a great fit for a lot of commercially relevant use cases like maintenance of existing code bases of more than trivial complexity and it's unlikely to be for a good while and where there is sensitivity to copyright. I think once that reality sets in there will be some degree of back-peddling.
Re: Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts
#3I'd be interested to hear about the experiences of someone who has gone through that Berkeley program or a similar one.
Re: Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts
#4It’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/web/20230628165639/https://github.co... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220204012915/https://github.co... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20200528195457/https://github.co...
Re: Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts
#5If you can rebrand yourself as an "expert" in some shiny new thing by spending a few weeks at a boot camp, there probably isn't much there and you will be competing for the same jobs against countless others who did the same.
I managed to completely ignore the cool new thing for the last 20 years and instead slowly built up knowledge in those problem domains that actually interest me, and it's worked out alright.
Re: Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts
#6If you can rebrand yourself as an "expert" in some shiny new thing by spending a few weeks at a boot camp, there probably isn't much there and you will be competing for the same jobs against countless others who did the same. I managed to completely ignore the cool new thing for the last 20 years and instead slowly built up knowledge in those problem domains that actually interest me, and it's worked out alright.
You assume that "branding yourself as an expert" is the same as "becoming an expert".
Re: Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts
#7If you can rebrand yourself as an "expert" in some shiny new thing by spending a few weeks at a boot camp, there probably isn't much there and you will be competing for the same jobs against countless others who did the same. I managed to completely ignore the cool new thing for the last 20 years and instead slowly built up knowledge in those problem domains that actually interest me, and it's worked out alright.
Agreed. Of the many things I've learned over the years, two related ones are:
if the work you're doing is work that you're genuinely interested in, you have a huge immediate advantage, and
Running into where crowd is running out, and running out of where the crowd is running in usually (but not always) gives you a large advantage.
Re: Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts
#8If you can rebrand yourself as an "expert" in some shiny new thing by spending a few weeks at a boot camp, there probably isn't much there and you will be competing for the same jobs against countless others who did the same. I managed to completely ignore the cool new thing for the last 20 years and instead slowly built up knowledge in those problem domains that actually interest me, and it's worked out alright.
You assume that "branding yourself as an expert" is the same as "becoming an expert".
My read of his comment is the opposite of that.
Re: Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts
#9A UK perspective on this is that the AI trend, as described in the article, would quickly turn into a class divide. Many employers in AI/ML spaces seem to want postgraduate degrees. Often the academic entry requirements to such degrees aren't that high (usually a bachelors degree with an "ok" mark like a 2:2 or a 2:1 min in a related subject - not exactly sky high attainment criteria) but the financial barriers are r…
I don't see it quite like that. It may be true that many employers are looking for postgrads. I don't know. But since practically _every single company_ large or small wants to know how or if they can take advantage of AI right now, there are plenty of opportunities to go around for anyone who has any knowledge or skills in generative AI.
And by far the most deployed technologies, even for postdocs, are going to be basically off-the-shelf or somewhat fine-tuned existing models via API or tooling being used for text and/or image generation for specific applications. In other words, things that in no way require the degree. That isn't to say that having real machine learning specialists isn't desirable, but there is plenty of room for people who just know how to apply the tools rather than invent new ones.
Actually there are plenty of "academic" papers coming out from people with advanced degrees that are mainly just applying GPT-4 to write code in some DSL to solve some category of problem. That stuff doesn't even require basic understanding of neural network architectures.
The latest models are so powerful it seems to be having a democratizing effect rather than increasing the class divide. From my perspective.
Re: Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts
#10half of them likely were crypto experts year ago.