angarg12

5,561 karmajoined il y a 9 ans

https://hnbadges.netlify.app/?user=angarg12

https://github.com/angarg12

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il y a 5 joursdiscuss

I got a Bachelor, Master, and PhD in Computer Science, with a total of 11 years of education. It's the biggest waste of time of my entire life.

As I progress in my professional career I'm more convinced that pretty much everything in tech is on-the-job learning, and universities are little more than a social club. Nowadays you can learn everything you do at university and far more online and for free.

Universities (elite ones particularly) still give you credentials that have some value getting a job. However I wonder for how long that will still be true. Learning by doing and building a portfolio sounds like a better way of getting in the industry today than getting a multi-year degree with nothing or little to show for it.

Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone to get a tech degree in a university unless it's a world class one. And even then, I would focus on networking and finding like-minded people rather than necessarily getting good grades.

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

> This exact thing is what software developers have been begging for since the beginning of the profession: Receiving a detailed outline of the problem and what the end result should look like.

> This is often the part that slows down software development. Trying to figure out what a vague, title only, feature request actually means.

But that is exactly what Software Engineering is!. It's 2026 and the notion that you can get detailed enough requirements and specifications that you can one-shot a perfect solution needs to die.

In my experience AI has made us able to iterate on features or ideas much faster. Now most of the friction comes from alignment and coordination with other teams. My take is that to accelerate processes we should reduce coordination overhead and empower individuals and teams to make decisions and execute on them.

il y a 6 moisdiscuss

This sounds like surface level wisdom if you are in your earlier career. I see several problems with this advice, but here is the most obvious one: this only works if you want to become a manager.

It used to be the case that the only way for engineers to advance their career. But we've long moved since and now you can have a long career and get very high in a company without management responsibilities. The examples given in the blog post are exactly what I would expect ICs to do, not managers.

Do you want advice to get promoted? if your company has a formal career ladder, look into the process and optimize for it. Despite people grievances, this is still the fastest and easiest method to get a promotion (shocker!).

il y a 6 moisdiscuss

As a european living in the US, the idea there is a market at all is laughable. I tried to get price quotes for treatments several time just to get a "well, it's hard to say" or "it's very complicated".

il y a 7 moisdiscuss

I love the concept of luck surface area. Worth a read

https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...

il y a 9 moisdiscuss

I'm hispanic and my two last names are Garcia Garcia. That is two last names that just happen to be the same.

When I moved to the US I could have dropped one or hyphenate them. I decided to keep it as-is, and use "Garcia Garcia" as my last name (space and all).

Besides confusing amongs americans and people always confusing one Garcia for middle name and one for last name, I had almost no problems. One time an airline messed up my plane ticket (again by dropping one of the Garcias) but that's it.

I appreciate other people have different experiences, I definitely met folks who have changed their names to conform to american customs and make things easier.

il y a 9 moisdiscuss

I left my home country over 10 years ago, and ever since I've travelled back once every 1 or 2 years.

Since 4-5 years ago I started to notice these betting houses cropping up where my family and friends live. They are impossible to miss, with big pictures of different sports and no windows.

The most important thing to notice is where these place are and are not. They proliferate in working class and less well off neighborhoods, while they tend to be absent from more affluent ones.

These places get a lot of foot traffic, all the locals barely making ends meet, blowing a few tens of euros here and there, with the eventual payoff. It's not difficult to hear stories of people getting into the deep end and developing a real addiction with devastating consequences.

And it's not only the business itself, but what they attract. All sort of sketchy characters frequent these places, and tend to attract drugs, violence...

Legal or not these places make the communities they inhabit worse, not better. I personally would be very happy if family didn't have to live exposed to them.

il y a 10 moisdiscuss

The argument that the article uses to critique AI coding is that coding is not the bottleneck, instead the testing and validation of ideas is.

This is a first-degree smart argument. It presents a seemingly non-obvious idea that makes sense in retrospect.

However I happen to work at the experimentation team of a hyperscaler so I have a different perspective.

First, we aren't always saturating all of the potential experiments we could be running. The reasons are different, but essentially it takes time and effort to build those experimental features. If that cost trended to 0, we could make sure to have a queue of experiments deep enough.

Also in our side we need to do development work to support new features and products. We have a backlog long enough to keep us perpetually busy. If dev cost trended to 0, we could always be ready to provide our customers what they need.

Speaking of new products, each one our company comes up with comes with extra effort to support in our side, and yet more effort to produce dozens of AB test to validate new functionality.

This is not talking about ongoing maintenance effort. Bugfixes, upgrades etc. take a non-trivial amount of effort to keep up.

And this is only inside our little experimentation team. What about security, reliability, scalability, efficiency... it makes me wonder if OP has experience running products at scale.

Instead I'd like to think that dropping the cost of development by orders of magnitude changes the equation of how we create products.

il y a 10 moisdiscuss

We drove from Seattle to SF and back on a Model 3, and I would say there were only a couple of situations where I wish we could keep driving instead of recharging. Otherwise almost all breaks for charging aligned with breaks to go to the toilet, eat, walk the dog, or simply have a rest.

Definitely a very minor inconvenience. And, compared with frequent trips to the gas station vs charging at home overnight, a total net positive in time saved (if you want to measure it that way).

il y a 10 moisdiscuss

I also thought this was a pretty silly way of bringing up range anxiety. It's like a dealership selling you a gas car with an empty tank. Obviously the very first thing you would do is to refill it before driving home.

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

That's a lot of questions so I'll try to answer one by one.

> Whats your recommendation for backend engineers that want to transition to ml engineers?

I get this a lot, and my first question would be, why do you want to work in ML? Is it because it's "cool"? because it's in high demand? because it pays a lot? for the second two points, see my comment. For the first point, I'm pretty cynical about it. At the end of the day it's a dev job not very different from other domains. Depending on where you end up, your day to day might look the same, but with focus in ML systems.

Nevertheless, if you really want to transition, I still think the easiest way is to do an internal transfer to a team that does ML. That's how I got this job. If you are a good engineer, most ML teams will be happy to have you and teach you the skills on the job.

Of course maybe there is no ML team in your current company. If you are in a small company you might try to influence leadership to start ML initiatives and get some experience. I've seen many candidates do this: they start an ML project in their current company, and after 6-12 months they look for a job elsewhere. This is a variant of CV driven development, and sadly often these initiatives are hamfisted and don't really solve business problems.

Otherwise you might try to get a job in ML in another company. Lucky for you I found some companies that hire engineers in ML or ML adjacent jobs using a standard software dev loop, i.e. no special ML round, although these difficult to find. The other option is to try to learn enough ML to pass an interview.

I won't lie, this is doable, but the deck is stacked against you. The job market is pretty insane right now, and you'll be competing with people with masters and PhD's in ML, plus engineers with years of experience in the field.

I believe it's fair to say that pure theoretical knowledge won't get a job, much less unless you have prestigious credentials. Instead I would focus on a blend of applied theory and personal projects. Probably it would be best to choose one ML framework and double down on it to increase your chance of finding a job that requires that particular framework.

For theory there are tons of courses and resources online, although I tend to like more walkthroughs and tutorials that guide you on building a system rather than pure theory. For practical experience, the sky is the limit. As I said there are tutorials online that guide you on a project, but that will almost certainly not be enough. You can try your hand at Kaggle competitions, and at some point you can just choose some personal project that interests you and try to build on it.

I hope any of this helps and best of luck to you. Feel free to DM me if you want to know more.

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

I never heard of people aiming at Staff+ positions with 6 yoe, but surely sounds like a stretch. I'd say that 5 years from new grad to senior at big tech is a fast-ish progression; a bit quick, but doable with skills, hard work and some luck.

I personally have +15 yoe total and I'm currently Staff in my company.

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

I'm not sure what part of my comment made you think that my current employer is an obstacle in job hunting. Actually it's quite the opposite, as I mention I get a lot of attention from recruiters even though I'm not actively looking. The issue I'm observing is that this attention doesn't clearly translate to more job opportunities.

If my current employer was the problem, wouldn't recruiters and hiring managers not bother reaching out, or reject my applications (I haven't applied to any job directly recently so I can't say).

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Thank your for sharing, it's great to hear different perspectives on the topic.

Non-transferable skills is actually one of my biggest concerns about working at the same company long term. These tools are often so far from the industry standard that it can hurt your employability long term as you mention.

It's no secret that devs often interview with companies they don't intend to join just as a warm up exercise. I confess I've been guilty of this.

The boomerang is quite interesting. Up until very recently this was a very well known career move. People would leave the company for one year just to come back at a higher level and higher salary. As a "loyal" employee I find this furious, but alas I guess it's my fault for working for such a lousy company and not pulling the same move. If it is any consolation, at least our company change the rules so that it's harder to pull this off, so you should see this much less often these days.

Regarding your last comment I'm not particular about leaving FAANG, as I aren't about working for FAANG. Considering my priorities it's very likely I'd only take a competing offer from another top tech company. For now I'm comfortable enough staying in my current company and passively looking for a better opportunity. At the same time I want to avoid becoming too complacent, and I'm aware the rug might get pulled from under my feet at any moment (hello layoffs?).

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Fully remote would be a pretty nice perk, ever since our companies forced us back to the office. I believe this alone might be one of the easiest ways for smaller companies to poach talent these days.

Other than that, I enjoy working in hard and impactful problems. I'm privileged that I was able to do that in FAANG, but it's unclear how long this will last. I know that is very trite to say that your company has changed, but I truly feel it. Our company missed the LLM train and we are scrambling to play catch up now. Also we mostly pivoted from bold and inspiring initiatives to efficiency and cost cutting. Most of the initiatives in our pipeline for this year are pretty dull "let's save some dollars here and there". Nothing wrong with that, but given the choice, the chance of working on a moonshot vs helping a trillion $ company save pennies might convince one to change jobs.

There is also the very trite but very true aspect of "small cog in a huge machine". I might engineer a new system that brings in tens of millions of dollars to the company, and I'd be lucky if 3 layers of management above me knows about it. Those kind of initiatives might influence the entire company in a smaller organization.

All in I recognize I'm quite privileged and doing pretty well in my current job, and that's why I'm passively looking. TBH one of the aspects is that I got FOMO from all the talk about ML engineers being in high demand. However my experience so far has been very underwhelming.

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

I'm a ML Engineer at FAANG and I have been passively looking for the last half year. Common wisdom might make you think that I should be having companies throwing wads of cash at me, but my experience has been very different.

* It's true that my profile attracts many messages from recruiters. However ghosting is the name of the game. More than half of recruiters have ghosted me at different stages of the process. Overall I'd say that attention from recruiters is a great vanity metric for your ego, but it means shit unless you can convert that into job offers.

* Although there is a lot of demand, the bar for hiring is also very high. Specifically companies are looking for someone with experience in their exact tech stack. Given there are a few major ML frameworks and I'm only familiar with one of them, that rules out a lot of jobs. In one case a company screened me out because I only had 6 years of experience in a particular tech instead of their required minimum of 8.

* So far my only outcomes have been 1 rejection and 2 downlevels to senior (I'm targeting Staff+ positions). Although I haven't been dedicated to job hunting, I haven't been successful either at receiving an offer.

* In terms of salaries, most companies tend to top out around half of my current comp. I have only spoken with less than a handful of companies that could offer more. I guess that has always been the case with FAANG, but seems more pronounced now.

Overall I think that currently the job market for ML Engineers is still better than for Software Engineers, but it's nothing like the fever dream market of 2020-2022.

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

I work for a big tech co, and our interview training explicitly says to not ask candidates about systems they have built in the past, but to ask them to build brand new systems from scratch.

This seems completely backwards to me. Is like saying "hey, do you know that relevant on the job experience that you have? we don't want to hear anything about it, here you have a made up scenario".

Ok ok, that is a bit cynical. Asking to design novel systems can give you some good insights about the candidate, or help with people who don't have experience building systems yet. Still it seems to me that asking candidates to describe real world systems that they have actually built is much more useful at checking their skills than building imaginary systems.

One argument against this is that candidates can "cheat" by preparing in depth a made up example. But how is that much different than the current approach?

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

I have a background in academia and extensive experience interviewing for FAANG, particularly at the entry level. For me this article highlights the futility of current higher education institutions.

From our experience a degree is a mild indicator of performance when hiring at entry levels. We get some great candidates with no degree, and many poor candidates with degrees. Above entry level, the correlation pretty much disappear. I'm really curios what kind of difficulties OP was facing for not having a title.

I don't think we have completely removed a title from our job posting requirements, but it usually uses one of those silly conversions (CS degree or x years of experience).

That makes me wonder, what value would Universities provide if a degree wasn't a signifier anymore? what if all tech companies hired purely based on interview performance and ignored titles even for filtering? I imagine a future where all the knowledge and material is open and free on the internet, and University staff acts more as coaches and mentors, helping people who needs it in a 1-1 fashion. One can dream.

il y a 5 ansdiscuss

I used to think like this. At it's core, it's a variation of "never give up", mixed with "the power of habit".

I agree with "the power of habit" part.

From the "never give up" point of view, I've changed my mind, thanks to books like The Lean Startup, Blitzscaling, and my own experience.

The bottom line message seems to be "keep insisting and you'll be successful". I spent 3+ years working in a game that never took off as a side project. In hindsight, I should have taken the hint of the lack of traction early on and dropped the whole thing. Instead I sank countless hours into a project that never worked out. How many prototypes could I have produced in the same time?

Bottom line, habits are good, so long as we don't mix it up with the concept of "don't give up and you'll be successful".

il y a 7 ansdiscuss

Humblebrag much?

I spent the first 7 years of my career in the public sector. Talk about a career killer.

If you are concerned about getting a job elsewhere, just study and do online coding exercises like crazy. That should land you a job at most companies with whiteboard interview at your seniority level.

If you are concerned about actual learning, most of my professional growth has been on the job.

I spent a long while doing 'proactive learning' where I would study new techs and frameworks. It turns out that all of them, either I never had to use, or when I had to, I needed a refresher, since I forgot most about it. Lately I have been doing more 'reactive learning', where I learn new things as I need them, or studying general topics that can be broadly applied.

Long story short, look for positions that will stretch your abilities, you'll be fine.